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James Russell Lowell 
as a critic 



BY 

JOSEPH J. REILLY 

M.A. (Columbia) ; Ph.D. (Yale) 

Formerly Instructor in English at the College of the City of 

New York 

Sometime Fellow in English at Yale University 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

Zhc 1kntc??etl)ocF?et press 
1915 






Copyright, 1915 

BY 

JOSEPH J. REILLY 



Ube Vtnicherbocher ptcBS^ l^ew H^orlt 

MAR 30 1915 
©aA;j!i8i4i 



MY MOTHER 

AND THE MEMORY OF 

MY FATHER 



PREFACE 

WITH the steady growth of interest in Ameri- 
can literature the position of James Russell 
Lowell as the greatest of our men of letters has 
been pretty generally conceded. The Vision of 
Sir Launfal is regarded as a classic and studied in 
our schools; The First Snowfall, The Dandelion, 
An Incident in a Railroad Car, typical of Lowell 
the poet, in his tenderness of sentiment, his appre- 
ciation of nature, his didacticism, are household 
poems among us. That sheaf of essays in lighter 
mood which numbers My Garden Acquaintance 
and A Good Word for Winter, wins for Lowell in 
many minds a place by the side of Thackeray's 
* ' Saint Charles . ' ' This same Lowell had thoughtful 
things to say on public libraries, on democracy, 
and in the heat of the Civil War many other 
things to say-^some thoughtful, others not. Of 
his prose his most noteworthy work was devoted 
to criticism. As a man of letters he was poet, 
essayist, student of politics, and critic, and on 
each of these many sides he deserves consideration. 
His has been regarded as the foremost position 



vi PREFACE 

in the history of American criticism and he has 
been compared, and sometimes without disparage- 
ment, to Matthew Arnold. Rarely in a modem- 
day volume of criticism or literary history does one 
fail to find an apt quotation from Lowell. Obvi- 
ously his critical work is known and read. This 
brilliant versatile Lowell, this college professor, 
editor, poet, etymologist, diplomat, essayist, stu- 
dent of literature and politics, did not for naught 
don the robes of critic and adventure to sit in the 
Siege Perilous amid that circle which numbers in 
EngHsh Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, Carlyle, and 
Matthew Arnold. 

It is the purpose of this study to weigh the 
merits of Lowell the critic, to consider dispassion- 
ately his gifts and equipment, to ascertain if 
possible his right to a place in the brilliant 
company of admitted critics. 

In these days when criticism is in large measure 
merely a series of personal impressions, one need 
not perhaps defend the objective method employed 
throughout this study. For the conclusions pre- 
sented here the writer alone is responsible. 

To Professor Cook of Yale, at whose suggestion 
this work was imdertaken, my gratitude is due 
for his unfailing interest and advice, and to Pro- 
fessor Beers of Yale for his kindness on many 
occasions. I wish to acknowledge my obligations 
to my sister. Miss Katherine M. Reilly, for pa- 
tience and care in transcribing, and to Miss Teresa 



PREFACE vii 

Ryan, whose aid in reading proof and in prepar- 
ing the index, has been generously given. 



J. J. R. 



State House, Boston, 
March, 1915. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. — Lowell: The Man and the Writer . i 

II. — The Range of Lowell's Knowledge 42 



III. — Lowell's Sympathy: Its Breadth 
and Limitations 

IV. — The Judicial Attitude with Lowell 

V. — Penetration : The Ultimate Gift 

VI. — Low^ell's Type of Mind 

VII. — Lowell: The Critic and His Criti 
CISM .... 

Bibliography .... 

Index ....'. 



n 
106 

136 

173 

200 

215 
221 



LOWELL AS A CRITIC 



CHAPTER I 

LOWELL : THE MAN AND THE WRITER 

THERE was good stock behind Lowell. His 
great-grandfather and his father were clergy- 
men; his grandfather attained a high position in 
the judiciary. All three were graduates of Har- 
vard. On his mother's side Lowell was descended 
from an Orkney family named Spence, whose 
lineage he liked to trace back to the redoubtable 
ballad hero, Sir Patrick Spens. 

Reverend Charles Lowell, Lowell's father, had 
been trained for the ministry and had sat under 
the famous Dugald Stewart. In religion he was 
an orthodox Congregationalist, but drifted more 
and more toward Unitarianism with the passing 
years. As pastor of the West Church in Boston 
he was zealous in his ministrations to his flock 
even to the point of impairing his health. He was 
remarkable in the pulpit for refinement of manner 
and a certain impressiveness which came not from 



2 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

originality of thought but from charm of person- 
ahty and a singularly sweet voice. His son wrote 
of him in 1844: "My father is one of the men you 
would like to know. He is Doctor Primrose in 
the comparative degree, the very simplest and 
charmingest of sexagenarians, and not without a 
great deal of the truest magnanimity." Doctor 
Lowell was not conspicuous for a sense of humor. ' 
He felt a deep interest and pride in his son's 
successes ; he thought the reviews of his poems were 
not laudatory enough, and professed to believe 
that he could not understand more than a tithe 
of what young Lowell wrote. 

Doctor Lowell had no sympathy with slavery. 
And yet like many good men of his time, he shrank 
from the thought of an inevitable conflict. Abo- 
litionism, too often the shibboleth of extremists, 
repelled him. He was in a word a conservative. 
The world around him seemed the theatre of 
much that was harsh and noisy and uncharitable. 
For his part he had the manifold duties of his 
parish and the alluring quiet of his library. There 
he had collected some three or four thousand 
volumes, among which, however, divinity was by 
no means paramount. A conservative even in 
literatiu*e, Doctor Lowell owned Pope as his 
favorite poet. 

Lowell's mother was a woman of romantic 
nature; she was fond of old ballads, which she 

^ Letters, i., 82. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 3 

often sang at twilight, was an omnivorous reader, 
and had a taste for languages. She was said to 
have the faculty of second sight. 

James Russell Lowell, bom in 18 19, was the 
youngest of six children. He attended a dame's 
school at Cambridge for the rudiments, and at the 
age of nine was sent to the classical school kept 
by William Wells, an excellent Latinist. Among 
Lowell's schoolmates were Thomas Went worth 
Higginson and W. W. Story, the "Edelmann 
St org" of Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, and Leaves 
from my Journal. Story became his intimate, 
with whom he read Spenser's Faery Queen. 

Lowell entered Harvard in 1834. He scribbled 
for the college magazine Harvardiana, wrote ebul- 
lient letters to "My dearest Shack," and plunged 
into omnivorous reading. In his senior year he 
cut recitations and chapel in the face of repeated 
warnings, committed an indiscretion at evening 
prayers, and was sent to rusticate at Concord. 
Here he met Emerson and Thoreau. "I met 
Thoreau last night, and it is exquisitely amusing 
to see how he imitates Emerson's tone and manner. 
With my eyes shut, I shouldn't know them apart." ^ 
As for Emerson: ''He is a good-natured man in 
spite of his doctrines." Lowell never got into 
sympathy with Thoreau, while for Emerson he 
was later to conceive an ardent friendship and 
an abiding admiration. 

* Letters, i., 27. 



4 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Lowell's heritage of conservatism found expres- 
sion in his class poem. ' ' The objects of his satire, ' ' 
says Greenslet, "were Emerson and Transcen- 
dentalism, Carlyle, Abolitionists, Temperance 
Agitators, Woman's Righters, and Vegetarians." 
Here too by the irony of fate his views were to 
encounter a decided change. Transcendentalism 
was to crop out in his later writings; he was to 
make some of Carlyle 's views his own and to 
confess towards him a secret partiality. The 
whirligig of time brought other revenges: he was 
to join forces with the Abolitionists and to lecture 
on Woman's Rights and Temperance. 

After getting his degree in 1838, Lowell was 
forced to decide on a profession. Literature 
appealed to him but it was a precarious calling, 
with little or no standing at the time. The 
ministry would have given open play to the didac- 
tic strain that was strong in him, but scruples 
held him back. He enters Dane Law School 
where he reads Blackstone "with as good a grace 
and as few wry faces as I may." ^ Within a month 
he has "renoimced the law" and decided "to 
settle down into a business man at last."' About 
three weeks afterwards he chances to hear Webster, 
the great Webster, argue a case before the United 
States Court, and within an hour has "determined 
to continue in my profession and study as well as 
I could." ^ But these were not happy days. Law 

» Letters, i., 32. » Ibid., i., 33. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 5 

was uncongenial. Lowell had been disappointed 
in love and even meditated suicide. In February, 
1839, he wrote: "I have quitted the law forever." 
Ten days later: "I am certainly just at present 
in a miserable state." But he thinks that "next 
Monday may see me with Kent's Commentaries 
imder my arm." Meanwhile he ''sometimes 
actually needs to write somewhat in verse." It 
is not hard to see where all this will finally end. 
In May, 1839, Lowell resumed his studies in law, 
received his degree in the summer of 1840, and a 
few months later became engaged to Miss Maria 
White, " a very pleasant and pleasing young lady," 
who knows ''more about poetry than anyone I 
am acquainted with."' 

From the stimulus that came to him from his 
engagement to a woman of beauty, high ideals, 
and poetic sensibility, Lowell profited greatly. 
Something about the witchery that was Maria 
White's accentuated those phases of Lowell's 
temperament which were his heritage from a 
mother who was a romantic by nature. He wrote 
verse and, introduced by Miss White to a group of 
her friends known as "The Band," foimd himself 
in an atmosphere electric with abolitionism and 
transcendentalism. Transcendentalism, so far as 
it followed Emerson, manifested itself in a vague 
mysticism, a pantheistic conception of God, op- 
timism, and a general idealism. These various 

"■ Letters, i., 51. 



6 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

phases appear now and then through a large part 
of Lowell's work, but mostly before 1848. In a 
paper on " Song Writing," to take but one example, 
he showed unmistakable traces of Emerson : 

True poetry is but the perfect reflex of true knowl- 
edge, and true knowledge is spiritual knowledge, 
which comes only of love, and which when it has 
solved the mystery of one, even the smallest effluence 
of the eternal beauty, which surrounds us like an 
atmosphere, becomes a clue leading to the heart of 
the seeming labyrinth. . . . Many things unseal the 
springs of tenderness in us ere the full glory of our 
nature gushes forth to the one benign Spirit which 
interprets for us all mystery and is the key to unlock 
all the most secret shrines of beauty. ^ 

If the following experience, detailed in a letter 
of September, 1842, could have occurred to a man 
of a temperament impressionable almost to the 
degree of mysticism, it is also true that the pectd- 
iar nature of the experience could only have been 
met with in an atmosphere surcharged with 
transcendentalism : 

I have got a clue to a whole system of spiritual 
philosophy. I had a revelation last Friday evening. 
I was at Mary's, and happening to say something of 
the presence of spirits (of whom, I said, I was often 
dimly aware) , Mr. Putnam entered into an argument 
with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the 

' The Pioneer, Feb., 1843; reprinted in Early Writings, p. yy. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 7 

whole system rose up before me like a vague Destiny- 
looming from the abyss. I never before so clearly 
felt the spirit of God in me and around me. The 
whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed 
to waver to and fro with the presence of Something 
I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and 
clearness of a prophet. I cannot yet tell you what 
this revelation was. I have not yet studied it enough, 
but I shall perfect it one day and then you shall hear 
it and acknowledge its grandeur. It embraces all 
other systems.^ 

One cannot but note the buoyant enthusiasm 
and self-confidence of the last two sentences. 
Lowell never became deeply entangled in the 
excesses of the movement which he pictured so 
humorously in Thoreau from the vantage point 
of later years. 

Abolitionism was by no means the fashion in 
the early '40's, but this was nothing to an enthusi- 
ast, and before the year was out Lowell was heart 
and soul in the movement. Writing to his class- 
mate Heath, a Virginian, he says: ''I cannot 
reason on the subject. A man who is in the right 
can never reason. He can only affirm." Further: 
"My heart whirls and tosses like a maelstrom 
when I think of it [slavery]." His letters during 
these years are fiUed with such phrases as **the 
freedom of 5,000,000 of men," the "curse of 
slavery," and the like. 

^ Letters, i., 69 ff. 



8 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

The stimulus of love and friendships, the need 
of success, and the new enthusiasm bom of his 
interest in abolitionism, while they brought no 
clients to Lowell the lawyer, furnished forceful 
impulse to Lowell the poet. In the fall of 1840 
appeared A Year's Life, a volume of poems, a 
few of which were of high quality. All told they 
were rather vague, but marked a poet to whom 
love and human brotherhood were topics of vital 
interest. 

To the Boston Miscellany, edited by his friend 
Hale, Lowell contributed a sheaf of prose essays 
during 1842. The most ambitious of them were 
papers on Elizabethan dramatists, Chapman, 
Webster, Ford, and Massinger. They are im- 
portant as Lowell's first ventures in criticism. 
Not that they are seriously to be regarded as 
critical, for their aim was to set out beautiful pas- 
sages from the old plays with comments — ^sign- 
posts for admiration — rather than to investigate 
dramatical construction or character develop- 
ment. In tone we find an odd blend of sophomo- 
ricism which believes itself knowledge of the world ; 
an air of superiority none the less present because 
entirely tmconscious; a tendency to preach which 
may have been a heritage but was to remain an 
abiding possession. ''We have grown too polite 
for what is holiest, noblest, and kindest in the 
social relations of life; but alas! to lie, to blush, 
to conceal, to envy, to sneer, to be illiberal, — 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 9 

these trench not on the bounds of any modesty, 
human or divine." ^ One thing about these papers 
is immistakable : Lowell had thus early an excellent 
taste which led him to recognize real poetry when 
he saw it. Not a single selection from the drama- 
tists — and he gives many — ^fails to justify itself 
for beauty of phrasing or imaginative quality. 

A fifth paper of the series on the Elizabethans 
appeared in The Pioneer for January, 1843, a 
magazine which Lowell himself launched with 
high hopes of success. It was hardly started 
when a serious trouble with his eyes sent him to 
New York for medical treatment. Three numbers 
of the new magazine appeared; the project was 
then abandoned. It may be seriously questioned 
how wide a patronage an editor was to command 
who assumed in his prospectus the position of 
arbiter elegantice : 

The object of the subscribers in establishing The 
Pioneer is to furnish the intelligent and reflecting 
portion of the reading public with a rational substi- 
tute for the enormous quantity of thrice diluted 
trash in the shape of namby-pamby love tales and 
sketches which is monthly poured out to them by 
many of our popular magazines, and to offer instead 
thereof a healthy and manly Periodical Literature, 
whose perusal will not necessarily involve a loss of 
time and a deterioration of every moral and intellec- 
tual faculty. 

^ Early Writings, p. 124. 



10 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Returning from New York where he had be- 
come acquainted with WiUis and other literati of 
the metropoHs, Lowell established himself at his 
father's home at Elmwood and prepared for the 
press a volume of poems which was issued late 
in the year 1843. He worked under depressing 
conditions, for his mother's mind had given way 
and that of his sister Rebecca betrayed signs of 
disorder. The White home was easily accessible 
and Lowell found solace in the company of his 
future wife. His volume received a gratifying 
reception and marked indeed, in sureness of tone 
and interest in the questions of the hour, a distinct 
advance over A Year's Life. In the success which 
attended the publication of these poems was 
mingled an ounce of bitter. Margaret Fuller, in 
her Review of American Literature, said of Lowell: 
"His interest in the moral questions of the day 
has supplied the want of vitality in himself." 
Lowell repaid the score in A Fable for Critics; 
he was hurt. Could it be that he felt some 
essential truth in the charge? 

On the literary work in which he was now en- 
gaged, Lowell could spend his imdivided energies. 
For although he wrote in March, 1841, "I am 
getting quite in love with the law," he confessed 
fourteen months later that it was a calling "which 
I hate, and for which I am not well fitted, to say 
the least." Six months later he abandoned it 
forever. "I cannot write well here in this cramped 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER ii 

up lawyer's office feeling all the time that I am 
giving the lie to my destiny." To that destiny 
as a man of letters he yielded himself, and with a 
sense of freedom, the first in years, he plunged 
into writing with a will. 

Late in the following year Lowell was married 
to Maria White, whose influence remained a domi- 
nant factor during her life. That same month 
appeared his first volume of prose. Conversations 
on Some of the Old Poets. The first half of the 
volume is given over to Chaucer; the second half 
to the old dramatists, Chapman and Ford. These 
papers are more ambitious than those published 
in the Boston Miscellany. There is about them 
a greater sureness, one might almost say cock- 
sureness, which suggests a kinship between Lowell 
and Macaulay. They are lengthy, with frequent 
and by no means brief digressions, with far- 
fetched introductions and spots of fervid rhetoric 
which dangerously approach the purple patch. 
Speaking of the prophet who bears a message to 
the world, he says: "In most cases men do not 
recognize him, till the disgtiise of flesh has fallen 
off, and the white wings of the angel are seen 
glancing in the full sunshine of that peace, back into 
whose welcoming bosom their flight is turned."' 
Here is all the vagueness of transcendentalism 
without anything of that prophetic tone which 
marked the utterances of its protagonist. The 

^ Conversations, p. 222. 



12 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

old poets get no lion's share of attention; Lowell 
empties his mind of his ideas on poetry, on love, 
on abolitionism, and politics; on every topic he 
undisguisedly assumes a didactic attitude. That 
bent of his mind which one might call puritanism 
appears when he says of Pope's poetry: "Show me 
a line that makes you love God and your neigh- 
bour better, that inclines you to meekness, charity, 
and forbearance, and I will show you a himdred 
that make it easier for you to be the odious reverse 
of all these."' 

Essentially the Conversations, so far as they 
concerned the Elizabethan dramatists, were the 
earlier papers in the Boston Miscellany, with the 
addition of numerous digressions on such topics 
as appealed to Lowell for an expression of opinion. 
Passages are transferred verbatim; often whole 
pages appear in Conversations with scarcely any 
change. On the whole the changes are away from 
simplicity towards a more expansive diction. In 
the Miscellany, for example, we find, "Nature is 
never afraid to reason in a circle." This becomes 
in Conversations: "Nature is never afraid to reason 
in a circle; we must let her assume her premises 
and make our deductions logical accordingly." 

In Conversations Lowell attempts to do more 
than state appreciative dicta; he seems desirous 
of getting at ultimate principles. "Shakespeare's 
characters," he says in Early Writings, "modify his 

» Conversations, p. 149. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 13 

plots as much as his plots modify his characters." 
After expanding this sentence slightly in Conver- 
sations, he adds: "This may be the result of his 
unapproachable art ; for art in him is but the trac- 
ing of nature to her primordial laws ; is but nature 
precipitated as it were by the infallible test of 
philosophy." The figurative mode of expression 
is worthy of notice. Wordsworth's Excursion is 
referred to and a discussion follows regarding the 
peddler-poet and the poetic element in man in 
general. This discussion betrays gaps in Lowell's 
mental processes and is phrased in figurative 
language; the sureness of statement is at variance 
with the uncertainty in thought. Opening to a 
page at random we come upon mention of Isaac 
Walton, Herbert, Cowper, Mrs. Unwin, Gold- 
smith, Collins, Mme. De Stael, Dwight, Milton. 
A motley array for a single page ! Lowell, twenty- 
five years of age, has been a hard reader, and has 
made himself acquainted with the great names of 
literature. Shakespeare we come upon constantly; 
already he was deus certe to Lowell. As in the 
early papers in the Boston Miscellany and the 
Pioneer, Lowell selects excerpts from his poets 
with a fine and discriminating taste. ^ 

After his marriage in December, 1843, Lowell 
went to Philadelphia with his young bride, as 
an editorial writer for the Pennsylvania Freeman. 

^ Most of the excerpts from the dramatic poets were iden- 
tical with those given in the earlier papers. 



14 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Both the Lowells contributed frequent verse to 
the Broadway Journal^ then edited by their friend 
Briggs. The Freeman's anti-slavery policy was 
not assertive enough to suit the views of Lowell, 
who besides found it ''hard to write when one is 
first married." His connection with the Freeman j 
one is not surprised to find, came to an end in May, 
and he returned with his wife to Elmwood. 

In spite of the happiness of married life and the 
demands of literattire, Lowell was not able entirely 
to dominate his adverse moods. 

My sorrows [he writes] are not literary ones, but 
those of daily life. I pass through the world and 
meet with scarcely a response to the affectionateness 
of my nature. I believe Maria only knows how loving 
I am truly. Brought up in a very reserved and con- 
ventional family, I cannot in society appear what I 
really am. I go out sometimes with my heart so 
full of yearning towards my fellows that the indifferent 
look with which even entire strangers pass me brings 
tears into my eyes. And then to be looked upon 
by those who do know me (externally) as * ' Lowell the 
Poet" — ^it makes me sick. Why not Lowell the man, 
— the boy rather, — as Jemmy Lowell, as I was at 
school?^ 

It was fortunate that he soon found in the birth 
of a child, Blanche, bom December 31, 1845, 
and in the increasing demands of literature, im- 

^ Letter s^ i., loi. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 15 

pulses away from such morbid yielding to mood. 
His ardor nms high and his keen interest in reform 
in general leads him to reproach Holmes, ten years 
his senior, whom he scarcely knew, with indiffer- 
ence. Meantime he receives a transatlantic hear- 
ing for abolitionism by contributing four papers 
early in 1846 to the London Daily News. But he 
was to be known in England and indeed in America 
more by his next venture than by anything he 
had yet achieved. 

In the Boston Courier for June 17, 1846, ap- 
peared the first of the Biglow Papers. Three 
more numbers followed during the next year, a 
year when the indolence of which Lowell all his 
life complained, was in his blood. But he awoke 
in 1848, issued a second volume of poems, a rapid 
series of articles for the Anti-Slavery Standard, 
seven more numbers while indignation over the 
Mexican War knocked at his heart, and most 
important of all from our present point of view, 
A Fable for Critics. 

Although the Fable for Critics is frankly a jeu 
d' esprit, bristling with whimsicalities of tone and 
manner, it contains many keen characterizations 
of American writers of the time. It was a distinct 
advance over Margaret Fuller's Review of American 
Literature, which contained some good things, 
but was more notable for erratic than for good 
judgment. Lowell, who put no uncertain finger 
on the soimd and the weak spots of the author 



i6 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

discussed, did not show himself infallible. He 
failed to do adequate justice to Poe, Bryant, and 
Thoreau. But the deeper qualities of Holmes, 
Cooper, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Emerson, 
Lowell undoubtedly did suggest. He constantly 
translates his characterizations into figurative 
language, a tendency which he never abandoned. 
Speaking of Hawthorne and his ''genius so shrink- 
ing and rare," he goes on : 

A frame so robust with a nature so sweet, 

So earnest, so graceful, so lithe, and so fleet, 

Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet ; 

'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood 

With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood, 

Should bloom after cycles of struggle and scathe. 

With a single anemone trembly and rathe. 

There is little or no attempt to go into principles ; 
in the last analysis the poem is a series of lightning- 
flash characterizations which are soimd on the 
whole because Lowell's intuitive perception was 
clear. 

As a wit and humorist, Lowell assumed a high 
rank after the publication of the Fahle and the 
Biglow Papers. The latter work was pirated in 
England in 1859, ^'^^ ^^^ vndcn. who was afterwards 
to be Ambassador at the Court of St. James and 
to be regarded as the foremost of American men 
of letters, was first known only as a writer of 
jingling verses in Yankee dialect. The enthusi- 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 17 

asm with which Lowell regarded reform in general 
and abolitionism in particular fired him with 
indignation over the prosecution of a war which 
to him represented jingoism and the lust of slavery 
for aggrandizement. 

Reform in politics was always to be an absorb- 
ing topic with Lowell, but now that the war was 
ended his interest flagged for a time. In the new 
poem he is projecting, The Nooning, he disclaims 
any intention of giving ''even a glance towards 
reform." He is feeling perhaps the reaction from 
the tense enthusiasm which his wife aroused and 
with her friends of "The Band" kept stimulated. 
But with the years he has drifted away from "The 
Band" and drawn near to the coterie of friends 
who made Boston a centre of thought and letters. 
And the keen impulse which his wife furnished was 
becoming dulled with her steady decline in health. 
Lowell himself was eager to take her to Europe 
that they both might enjoy a long holiday in the 
midst of "new faces, other minds." In July, 
1 85 1, he sailed with his wife and two children for 
the Mediterranean. 

Most of the first year abroad was spent in 
Italy. In November, 1852, Lowell wrote to 
Briggs: "I have written nothing since I left home 
except a few letters and a journal now and then. 
I have been absorbing. I have studied Art to some 
purpose." His tendency to indolence afilicts his 
conscience at times. He writes: "I am beginning, 



!8 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

I hope, to find out that I can work. Laziness has 
ruined me hitherto." From Italy the Lowells 
passed through Switzerland, Germany, and 
France and spent some time in England. Lowell 
is in a depressed mood which is evident in all his 
letters. His little son has died and is buried at 
Rome; his wife is steadily declining in health. 
Back in America among the beloved surround- 
ings of Cambridge, Maria Lowell dies (October 27, 
1853) and Lowell has to summon up all the re- 
serves of a natiire "sloping to the southern side" 
in order to battle against the feeling of desolation 
which threatened to overwhelm him. 

If that reserve and self-control at crises which 
came to LoweU from the paternal side stood him 
in good stead at this time, the maternal heritage 
of sensitiveness to impressions made his faculty 
of vision especially acute. He saw his wife in 
dreams, now alone, now with her child on her knee, 
and again he sees '*a crescent of angels standing 
and shining silently."^ 

But the world of matter-of-fact surrounds him 
and he finally gets his grip on things again. Some 
time before he was asked to deliver a course of 
lectures at Lowell Institute and was paid in ad- 
vance. The labor of preparing the series of twelve, 
which he purposed giving, furnished him with 
an outlet for his mental activities. The course 
began January 7, 1855. Two days later he writes 

» Scudder, i., 358. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 19 

to W. J. Stillman: "I delivered my first lecture to 
a crowded hall on Tuesday night and I believe 
I have succeeded. The lecture was somewhat 
abstract, but I kept the audience perfectly still 
for an hour and a quarter." This first lecture 

was occupied with definitions, and in a familiar way 
Lowell set about distinguishing poetry from prose. 
. . . Having cleared the way, he took up the con- 
sideration of English poetry in the historical order, 
dealing with the forerunners, Piers Ploughman's 
Vision, the Metrical Romances, and the Ballads; 
and then devoting one lecture each to Chaucer, 
Spenser, Milton, Butler, and Pope. ^ 

In the next discourse he took up the subject of 
poetic diction; in the eleventh, he dealt with 
Wordsworth; in the twelfth, with "The Func- 
tion of the Poet." The series proved a decided 
success. ^ This is not hard to tmderstand. They 
were popular in form, free from abstruse discus- 
sion, rich in illustration, in citation from the 
authors under discussion, and sparkling in humor. 
In breadth of treatment, grace of diction, and 
freedom from didacticism they mark a distinct 
advance over the Conversations. Incomplete as 
they are it is difficult to estimate them justly. 

^ Scudder, i., 374. 

» These lectures were printed in more or less abridged form 
in the Boston Advertiser, whence they were reprinted in 1897, 
y the Rowfant Club of Cleveland, Ohio. 



20 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

But whatever was good in them reappeared in the 
later critical essays. Lowell was not the man to 
waste an epigrammatic sentence, a comprehensive 
paragraph, or a striking figure.' The following 
sentence is typical; it shows Lowell's irony, his 
humor, his poetry, and that tendency already 
noted which was ever a prime characteristic of 
his criticism, — interpretation by means of figures: 

In our New England especially, where May-day 
is a mere superstition and the Maypole a poor half- 
hardy exotic which shivers in an east wind almost as 
sharp as Endicott's axe, — where frozen children, in 
unseasonable muslin, celebrate the floral games with 
nosegays from the milliner's, and winter reels back, 
like shattered Lear, bringing the dead spring in his 
arms, her budding breast and wan dislustered cheeks 
all overblown with the drifts and frosty streaks of his 
white beard, — where even Chanticleer, whose sap 
mounts earliest in that dawn of the year, stands 
dumb beneath the dripping eaves of his harem, with 
his melancholy tail at half-mast, — one has only to 
take down a volume of Chaucer, and forthwith he 
can scarce step without crushing a daisy, and the 

^ On this point compare the quotation in the text with the 
following from "Under the Willows" (1868), Poetical Works, 
iii., 151. 

"And Winter suddenly, like crazy Lear, 
Reels back, and brings the dead May in his arms. 
Her budding breasts and wan dislustered front 
With frosty streaks and drifts of his white beard 
All overblown." 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 21 

sunshine flickers on small new leaves that throb thick 
with song of merle and mavis. ^ 

It is not hard to understand why this course 
appealed to a popular audience. 

A speedy and important result followed these 
lectures: Lowell received the appointment to 
succeed Longfellow as Professor of Belles- Lettres 
at Harvard. He accepted and went abroad for 
a year spending most of the time in Germany 
studying the language diligently and attending 
lectures in German literature and aesthetics. "^ "I 
have made some headway," he writes in January, 
1856, "can read German almost as easily as French. 
That is already something. Meanwhile, my 
studies do me good. My brain is clear and my 
outlook over life seems to broaden." Again: 
"My study of German widens so before me — the 
history of the literature is so interesting and, by 
its harmonies and discords with our own, sets so 
many things in a white light for me, that I see 

^ Lectures on English Poets (Rowfant Club), p. 80. 

* He writes from Dresden in October, 1855: "I am reading 
for my own amusement (du Hebe Gott!) the aesthetische For- 
schungen von Adolf Zeising, pp. 568, large octavo! Then I 
overset something aus German into English. . . . Nachmittag 
I study Spanish with a nice young Spaniard who is in the house, 
to whom I teach English in return. Um seeks Uhr ich 
spazieren gehe, and at 7 come home and Dr. R. dictates and I 
write. . . . Then, after tea, we sit and talk German — or what 
some of us take to be such — and which I speak like a native — 
of some other country." Letters, i., 241 ff. 



22 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

infinite work and satisfaction ahead. I have 
learned a httle of the German thoroughness of 
investigation." He is eager to go to Italy: "Any 
trifle is enough to whirl my thoughts in that 
direction." And he soothes his scruples over this 
vagrant desire by exclaiming: "It would freshen 
up my Italian, which has fallen frightfully into 
abeyance here." He rims away to Italy for a 
few months and returns to Dresden in Jime. He 
has not outgrown his moods. His holiday across 
the Alps recalls the gloomy winter in Germany, 
and he wonders how he succeeded in learning so 
much of the language "when I think what a restive 
creature I was all last winter." 

In the autumn (1856), he imdertook his duties 
as professor and remained in harness for sixteen 
consecutive years. The continuity of his life, 
rudely broken by the death of his first wife, was 
renewed by his marriage in 1857, to Miss Frances 
Dunlop, the governess of his daughter. He could 
now without domestic anxiety concentrate on his 
professorial work. This he carried on in no 
strict fashion. His method of conducting class 
varied with his mood. He entertained the students 
at his home but was not certain to recall their 
faces when next he met them. Although freed 
from most of the drudgery of teaching languages, 
Lowell never quite reconciled himself to the class- 
room. "What can a man do in a treadmill?" 
he asks, writing to Fields in 1864. Again: "If I 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 23 

can sell some of my land and slip my neck out of 
this collar that galls me so I should be a man 
again. I am not the stuff that professors are 
made of. . . . My professorship is wearing me 
out." His moods pursued him always. He gives 
warning to Ho wells in 1882, regarding the accep- 
tance of a professorship: ''If you are a systematic 
worker, independent of moods, and sure of your 
genius whenever you want it, there might be no 
risk in accepting." 

Lowell worked hard, not infrequently poring 
over his books till early morning. Among his 
courses at various times during his professorship 
were those in German, Spanish (especially Don 
Quixote), Italian (concentrating on Dante), and 
Old French, the last becoming his special field. 

In the meantime his labors were not confined 
to the classroom and its concerns. He accepted 
the editorship of the newly established Atlantic 
Monthly, and with such contributors as Emerson, 
Holmes, Longfellow, Whittier, and Thoreau, an 
excellent literary taste of his own, and a capacity 
for hard work which outer influence had forced to 
become fairly consistent, he achieved a distinct 
success in the imdertaking. Most of the best- 
known contributors to the Atlantic formed the 
Saturday Club whose monthly dinners became 
famous. Here Lowell met in intimacy minds 
at once cultured and acute and the contact gave 
him much of that stimulus which he craved. 



24 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

To the Atlantic Lowell contributed freely — 
reviews, poems, and political papers. Politics 
engaged his attention again with the outbreak of 
the Civil War, and he even revived the Biglow 
Papers to furnish a vent for his ardent opinions. 
Five young relatives died in the Federal service; 
Lowell's white-hot patriotism was not an abstract 
matter, merely a phase of his philosophy of life; 
it was vibrant with that emotion which love must 
feel when its dear ones taste the bitterness of 
death. That is why several of the second series 
of the Biglow Papers glow with a passion quite 
unknown to the earlier set. Lowell however 
did not retain his editorial position through the 
troublous days of the Civil War: he yielded his 
chair to James T. Fields in 1861, and in January, 
1864, undertook the editorship of the North Ameri- 
can Review jointly with Charles Eliot Norton. 

In the North American most of Lowell's sub- 
sequent papers on politics and criticism were to 
appear. His political essays evidence his un- 
failing brilHance, but they are often charged with 
literary allusions which make one doubt their 
appeal to any but the highly educated few: "In 
this late advertising tour of a policy in want of a 
party, Cleon and Agoracritus seem to have joined 
partnership and the manners of the man match 
those of the master."' These essays are clearly 
the work of one who writes from the sanctum in 

^ Works, v., 296. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 25 

an appeal to what must prove a limited circle. 
At times they show breadth of view and such 
wisdom as could say, as early as 1866: [The South- 
ern people] ''have won our respect, the people of 
Virginia especially, by their devotion ... in 
sustaining what they believed to be their righteous 
quarrel."^ But one finds at other times a con- 
fusion of expression as well as of thought, a tend- 
ency to let argument gyrate instead of advance, an 
indulgence in sophomoric humor and even personal- 
ities: ''We remember seeing the prodigious nose of 
Mr. Tyler (for the person behind it had been added 
by nature merely as the handle to so fine a hatchet) 
drawn by six white horses through the streets."^ 
There is no mistaking Lowell in these papers ; he is 
the enthusiast of 1840 grown older, confident in 
his point of view, impatient towards a difference 
of opinion, inclined to cocksureness in tone. 

Lowell's best work in the North American was 
not concerned with politics but with literature. 
From 1865 till 1876 he published there all those 
critical essays which were later to be issued as My 
Study Windows and as the two volumes of Among 
My Books. Written as they were at the height of 
his powers, they furnished the basis on which his 
reputation as a critic largely rests. ^ 

^ Works, v., 325. Cf., also, v., 152, 227. 

2 Ibid., v., 296. Cf., also, v., 214, 250, 253. 

3 Numerous book reviews in various magazines, especially 
in the Atlantic and North American, have not been reprinted. 



26 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

The years from 1865 to 1872 saw the he^^day of 
Lowell's achievement, nearly all his best prose 
writings, many of his finest poems, and his most 
sustained efforts in sanctum and classroom. Feel- 
ing the need of a rest after sixteen years of teach- 
ing, he resigned his places both as editor and 
professor in 1872, and spent the following two years 
in Etirope. The reaction from the labor of teach- 
ing and editing brought about a fall in spirits. 
"The prevailing tone of his letters during these 
years was, as always, cheerful; but reading be- 
tween the lines we can see that his mood partook 
more and more of a sombre melancholy."^ Some 
months were spent in England, a winter in Paris, 
where Lowell worked hard at Old French, the 
summer following in Switzerland and Germany, 
and the winter in Italy. From Naples he writes 
that he has been "twice to the incomparable 
museum which is to me the most interesting in 
the world." But on the whole his Italian letters 
make almost no mention of the art treasures which 
surround him. Remembering this same lack in 
his letters diuing his earlier jotuneyings, one is 
not surprised. He received academic honors 
from Oxford and Cambridge and returned home 
to America in July, 1874, resolved, as he wrote 
humorously to Hughes, to try "to be as good as 

« Greenslet, p. 174. Lowell writes to Norton, February, 
1874: [I am] "happy for the first time (I mean consciously 
happy) since I came over here." 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 27 

the orator [at Cambridge University] said I was." 
He resumed his teaching at Harvard, being 
persuaded to accept the chair which he had re- 
signed on going abroad, read incredibly long hours 
every day, and in his poetry showed a revival of 
his old-time interest in political reform. Sent 
to the Republican National Convention of 1876, 
he opposed Blaine, and as a Presidential Elector 
he voted for Hayes against Tilden in the contested 
election of that year. 

Eminent men of letters like Irving and Motley 
had been sent on diplomatic missions in the past, 
and talk of Lowell for a similar appointment 
began to appear in the press. He declined the 
post at Vienna, but later accepted that at Madrid. 
He dislikes leaving Elmwood, he writes his daugh- 
ter, especially ''while it is looking so lovely." 
But the appointment to Madrid ''will be of some 
use to me in my studies." 

Lowell's career as Minister to Spain was success- 
ful, but as he wrote almost nothing except what 
his office demanded, the years 1877 to 1880 have 
little bearing on him as a man of letters. He 
becomes proficient in Spanish, picks up rare edi- 
tions of Don Quixote and the Cronica of the Cid, 
and complains of the lack of scientific booksellers. 
He was obviously Lowell the man of letters despite 
the requirements of diplomacy, and it is interesting 
to note that in his dispatches to the State Depart- 
ment at Washington he could record that the 



28 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

prettiest women at a great public function were 
those from Andalusia, and that in writing of the 
death of the young Queen Mercedes, he should 
quote a ''familiar stanza of Malherbe." 

In the late spring he went on an excursion to 
Greece. Writing to his daughter from Athens, he 
says he found the town "shabby" and "modem" 
and "was for turning about and going straight 
back again." He visits the Acropolis and the 
Parthenon, which do not seem to make any notable 
impression. His holiday over, he returns to Madrid 
to resume his work. 

One day in January, 1880, he receives notice 
of his transference to the Court of St. James. 
Probably no part of Lowell's career gave him 
more satisfaction than the five years he spent as 
American Minister to England. A notable man 
of letters, a brilliant conversationalist, a ready 
speaker, the accredited representative of a great 
nation, he had every reason to receive kindly 
treatment in England. There can be no doubt 
but that in an important sense Lowell's career was 
a distinct success. It has been pointed out that 
his social affiliations centred in the two classes, 
literary and aristocratic, whose opposition had 
been directed against the North in the Civil War. ^ 
One remembers Lowell's bitter attacks upon 
England's pro-Southern attitude during those 
tense years, and recalls too that the irony of fate 

^ Vide Literary World, vol. xvi., 222 fl. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 29 

had played other and earlier pranks with him. 
He seems to have been quite out of touch with 
men like Bright and Dilke and Chamberlain. 
Was it true that his indolence of temperament led 
him to ''seek the line of least resistance," and that 
"this was for him in England the line of aristocratic 
association?"' 

There was talk of making him Lord Rector of 
St. Andrews, and before returning to America 
he refused a nomination to a professorship at 
Oxford. But most important for our purpose 
are his literary utterances, especially those on 
Fielding, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Cervantes' 
Don Quixote, which he delivered on various occa- 
sions during his English mission. These critiques 
are not Lowell's best work. They are rather 
fragmentary, more like notes hastily assembled 
than like finished products. He himself was 
conscious of their defects and regretted that his 
official duties kept him at the beck of every chance 
interruption. For one thing especially we may 
notice them here: the tone is more nearly that of a 
man writing '' at the centre" than that of any other 
of his works. He was in London, not in Cambridge, 
Massachussetts, and he recognized that indefin- 
able something which marks the atmosphere of 
a cosmopolis. It was a good thing for Lowell to 
be at the centre and to feel the critical eyes of a 
select audience in Westminster Abbey leveled 

^ Vide Literary World, vol. xvi., 223. 



30 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

upon him. It was unfortunate that cosmopolitan 
influence came so late. 

Superseded by Mr. Phelps in his diplomatic 
mission, Lowell returned to America in June, 1885. 
He had six years still to live, during which the 
love of friends and wide recognition as the leading 
figure in American letters were unquestioningly his. 
He contributed poems now and then to various pub- 
lications, especially to the Atlantic, gave occasional 
addresses, and wrote a few critical essays. This 
comprised, with one exception, his original work. 
He looked after the collection and publication of 
various of his writings, in prose and verse, which 
had already reached the public either as addresses 
or in the pages of magazines and reviews. 

It was a remarkable coincidence that Lowell's 
last sustained effort in the field of criticism should, 
like his earliest one, have to do with the Eliza- 
bethan dramatists; that his last conspicuous ap- 
pearance as a lecturer should be, like his first one, 
under the auspices of the Lowell Institute. It is 
interesting to compare the thin volume called 
Old English Dramatists, published after Lowell's 
death, with the earlier papers on the same subject 
in the Boston Miscellany in 1842, and in Conversa- 
tions published two years later. These lectiires 
of 1887, like the early papers, comprise excerpts 
from the dramatists, with appreciative comment, 
rather than a body of formal criticism. Like the 
Conversations they furnish Lowell a medium for 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 31 

the expression of his views on various matters: 
the need of a National Capital ; the value of biog- 
raphy in the appreciation of an author ; the place 
of imagination in life. But Lowell does not 
wander far afield. He comes back to a discus- 
sion of form, of plot, of the refinement of language, 
questions which were beyond his power adequately 
to treat in Conversations. His tone has the easy 
certainty born of ripe years given to a study ol the 
subject; it is the tone of a man who looks at his 
audience from the eminence which belongs to a 
long life and knowledge of the world and an estab- 
lished reputation in the field of letters. There is 
no striking shift of opinion between the early and 
the final discussion of the old dramatists, except 
in one instance. To the Lowell of the Boston 
Miscellany and Conversations, Ford is a prime 
favorite. Said the Lowell of 1 844 : 

Set beside almost any of our modern dramatists, 
there is certainly something grand and free about him 
[Ford] ; and though he has not that * ' large utterance ' ' 
which belonged to Shakespeare, and perhaps one or two 
others of his contemporaries, he sometimes rises into a 
fiery earnestness which falls little short of sublimity. ^ 

Says the Lowell of 1887 : 

In reading him [Ford] again after a long interval, 
with elements of wider comparison, and provided 

* Conversations, p. 238. 



32 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

with more trustworthy tests, I find that the greater 
part of what I once took on trust as precious is really 
paste and pinchbeck. . . . He abounds especially 
in mock pathos. . . . Having once come to know the 
jealous secretiveness of real sorrow, we resent these 
conspiracies to waylay our sympathy. ^ 

One can explain and to some extent appreciate 
Lowell's resentment over what he deems mock 
pathos, if one remembers that this is the Lowell 
who but two short years before had seen his wife 
laid to rest in an English grave. 

It was to miscellaneous literary work that 
Lowell devoted these last years. But he did not 
forget the friends across the Atlantic. He sailed 
to England to spend there the summer of 1886 and 
made the voyage again in the spring of 1887. He 
soon found himself, he writes, "trotting around 
in the old vicious circle of dinners and receptions." 
London stimulated him. "It amuses and interests 
me. My own vitality seems to reinforce itself 
as if by some unconscious transfusion of blood 
from these ever throbbing arteries of life into my 
own." But he was steadily getting to the point 
where such stimulus was becoming ineffectual, 
for his physical vitality was on the wane. He 
spent the two following summers in England,^ 
and on returning devoted himself to revising the 

' Old English Dramatists, p. 128 ff. 

' In June, 1888, Lowell received the degree of Doctor of Letters 
from the University of Bologna. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 33 

final edition of his works. Unable to get about 
except with great pain, he reads Scott and Boswell's 
Johnson and "Kipling's stories . . . with real 
pleasure." He was a reader to the end. 

James Russell Lowell died at Elmwood in 
Cambridge, August 12, 1891. 

What now is one to keep in mind about Lowell.^ 
His father was a man of charming manner, ardent 
piety, but of little originality. His mother was 
accredited with second sight. She had a romantic 
nature and was a great reader. In Lowell him- 
self were blended the strong common-sense and 
conservatism of New England forebears and the 
tendency to romance and mysticism which was 
his maternal heritage. As early as 1840 he has 
visions; after his first wife's death he sees her in 
dreams; as late as 1889 he tells Dr. Mitchell that 
''commonly he saw a figure in medieval costume 
which kept on one side of him."' The world 
that eludes mortal eyes seems always ready to 
become palpable to his vision. This mystic strain 
in him does not always conjure up pleasant or 
even neutral imaginings. "I remember," he 
writes in 1884, "I remember the ugly fancy I had 
sometimes that I was another person, and used 
to hesitate at the door [of my study] when I came 
back from my late night walks, lest I should find 
the real owner of the room sitting in my chair 
before the fire." 

^ Letters^ ii., 371 (note). 
3 



34 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

It is obvious that such a man will be to a con- 
siderable extent the creature of moods. He says 
of himself: 

For me Fate gave, whate'er she else denied, 
A nature sloping to the southern side; 
I thank her for it, though when clouds arise 
Such natures double-darken gloomy skies. 

The pleasant moods were ebullient. "I am sure 
that for my single self, I always am a fool when 
I am happy."' His letters at such a time sparkle 
with quips and cranks and puns; one cannot but 
wonder how such a buoyant creature could ever 
know depression. But the depression comes. 
He writes in 1884: ''Every now and then my good 
spirits carry me away and people find me amusing, 
but reaction always sets in the moment I am left 
to myself." We shall return to this last sentence 
again. 

Lowell frequently accuses himself of dilatoriness 
and indolence, "constitutional indolence," he 
calls it. In moments of depression he thinks of 
this weakness as almost fatal: "I have thrown 
away hours enough to have made a handsome 
reputation out of."^ In 1878 he speaks of willing 
his books to the Harvard Library, "whither they 
will go when I am in Mount Auburn, with so much 
undone that I might have done. I hope my grand- 

^ Letters, i., 45. * Ibid., ii., 179. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 35 

sons will have some of the method I have always 
lacked." He finds it depressing (in 1889) "to 
be reminded that one has lived so long and done 
so little."^ These are the regrets of a man suffer- 
ing not merely from a mood of depression, but 
from the consciousness of a fatal defect within 
himself which robbed his accomplishment of its 
best vitality. What this defect was will be evident 
later on. 

At least once Lowell's mood carried him, as 
we have seen, close to sentimentality.^ But 
while the temperament of his fathers and his own 
sense of htimor kept him from such an extreme 
thereafter, his vein of sentiment lay ever near the 
surface. At eighteen he likes *'the poetry that 
sends a cold thrill through one . . . and brings 
tears into one's eyes." He says he could never 
read the bibhcal passage, "Bless me, even me also, 
my Father!" without tears in his eyes. Love, 
the greatest of sentiments, affected him deeply. 
We are not surprised at his youthful susceptibility, 
and are prepared to find that ''in common with 
Petrarch, Dante, Tasso, and Byron, I was desper- 
ately in love before I was ten years oJd."^ At 
eighteen he writes: ''Shack, pity me! I am in 
love — and have been so for some time, hopelessly 

^ Letters, ii., 367. 

• Vide Letters^ i., loi. Cf. "I do abhor sentimentality from 
the bottom of my soul." — Ihid., i., 205. 
J Ihid., i., 18. 



36 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

in love." One day at Allston's gallery, "I saw 
something that drove me almost crazy with de- 
light. You know how beauty always affects me. 
Well, yesterday I saw the most beautiful creature 
I ever set these eyes upon ! 'Twere vain to attempt 
to describe her," etc' One must note how ebul- 
liently enthusiastic he is when pleased. Shake- 
speare awoke in him a not utterly dissimilar 
enthusiasm. To the attraction of feminine influ- 
ence Lowell was always open. Engaged to Maria 
White, he responded for years to the powerful 
stimulus which her temperament and nature 
exerted upon his. At a later period, Frances 
Dunlop, a woman ot fine distinction of mind, 
came into his life to fill that void which the death of 
his first wile had left. Many of his most delightful 
letters were written to women. One notices that 
during his last years his correspondence is more 
and more devoted to his feminine friends, the 
delicate responsiveness of whose sympathy he 
doubtless felt answered to his needs. "I always 
thirst after affection, and depend more on the 
expression of it than is altogether wise."^ 

This dependence, it is fair to suggest, seems not 
to be a necessity to Lowell in this direction alone. 
One remembers his letter quoted above: "People 
find me amusing but the reaction always sets in 
the moment I am left to myself." These confes- 
sions suggest an important question : Was Lowell 

' Letters, i., 40. ' Ibid., ii., 76. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 37 

sufficient unto himself? Did he stand in need of 
impulses from without in order not merely to 
maintain an equable mood but to awaken that 
activity within him which found expression in his 
more important literary work? Whichever way 
we answer this question it is certain that influences 
quite outside himself played a notably large part 
in Lowell's life. His first poem of any worth is 
evoked by his position as class poet. He abandons 
the law only to resume it because he is impelled 
to emulation by the oratory of Webster. He falls 
imder the spell of Maria White and her ideas 
become his. Her pet interest, abolitionism, be- 
comes his pet interest, until with her declining 
health he is thrown more into contact with his 
circle of acquaintances in Cambridge. His ardor 
cools and he decides in 1850 not to ''glance towards 
reform" in his new poem, The Nooning. The 
Mexican War evokes his first popular poetic 
work, the Biglow Papers, just as the Civil War, by 
demanding the lives of some dear ones among his 
kin, furnishes the impulse for the second series of 
the same work. His first effective criticism he 
prepares to fulfill his obligations to the Lowell 
Institute, and he studies hard in the field of lin- 
guistics in his capacity of professor at Harvard. 
The Atlantic Monthly stimulates him to hard work 
and to some production, and it is while editor of 
the North American that he writes the most of his 
critical essays and political papers. The demands 



38 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

of occasion produce nearly all the remaining prose 
writings which are now among his published works. 
In poetry, those three odes which may be con- 
sidered his opera magna are the fruit of occasion. 
Is it too much to conclude that Lowell showed a 
marked dependence on stimuli outside of himself 
and that such dependence points to a source of 
weakness?^ 

It has already been pointed out that Lowell was 
an enthusiast. Men and things that he likes, he 
likes superlatively. When he changes his opin- 
ions, he becomes as enthusiastic on the new side 
as on the old. He sneers at Emerson and then 
worships him; laughs at abolitionism, then makes 
it a fetish for years ; attacks the Confederate States 
bitterly for treachery, =^ and then compliments 
them for their devotion to the cause they believed 
right; flings sarcasm at the English aristocracy^ 
and then pays them charming compliments in his 
address on Democracy. There is no purgatory 
with Lowell. Perhaps there was more than a 
grain of truth in Poe's declaration that Lowell was 
a "fanatic in whatever circumstances you place 
him." 4 

This enthusiasm of Lowell's did not destroy 

^Lowell ** liked to have some one help him idle the time 
away, and keep him as long as possible from his work," How- 
ells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance, p. 213. 

^ Works, Y.,^0. 3 Ibid., v., 214. 

^ Poe's Works (Stoddard's Edition), vi., 240. 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 39 

that basic conservatism which was his heritage 
from his New England ancestry. "Lowell was 
at heart, as by temperament, a conservative," 
says his friend Ciirtis. "I was always a natiiral 
Tory," Lowell himself confesses. In his yotmger 
days he attended an anti-slavery convention in 
Boston (May, 1844), in which a vote for disunion 
was carried. Enthusiastic abolitionist though he 
was, Lowell voted against the measiu'e. He did 
not want secession nor did he want war, and as 
late as January, 1861, his tone is that of a man 
who cannot convince himself that the govern- 
ment he has known and always taken for granted 
is on the eve of a mortal struggle. Devoted 
though he was to Emerson personally, he never 
became deeply impregnated with transcendental- 
ism and pictured it with broad humor in his essay 
on Thoreau. He was a friend and admirer of 
Agassiz, but that phase of nineteenth century 
science which we call evolutionism awakened his 
distrust. He feared it might usurp the place of 
''that set of higher instincts which mankind have 
found solid under their feet in all weathers."^ 
His address on Democracy is essentially a plea for 
conservatism. Accept yotu* government as it is, he 
advises ; make it a good government by being your- 
selves as individuals honest, unselfish, and patriotic. 

^Letters, ii., 245. Cf. ihid., ii., 168. Cf. also, ibid., ii., 
325: "I am a conservative (warranted to wash), and keep on 
the safe side — with God as against Evolution." 



40 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Interested as Lowell was in politics, he showed 
his interest by active participation on only one 
occasion. He wrote numerous political papeis 
whose appeal could be only to the cultured elect. 
His political ideas were all in the large. They were 
the ideas of a man who loves, 

"Walled with silent books, 
To hear nor heed the world's unmeaning noise, 
Safe in my fortress stored with lifelong joys." 

Lowell knew men, in fact, far less from personal 
contact than from commune with those same 
"silent books." When he starts a magazine he 
wants to educate the public by telling it that all 
the other magazines serve up "thrice-diluted 
trash" which tends to the ''deterioration of every 
moral and intellectual faculty." One would 
hardly regard this as the attitude of a man who 
understood human natiu-e. When he attempts 
to write a serio-comic poem called Our Own (1853) 
for Putnam's, he heads it with quotations from the 
Greek, Latin, and English, has a digression in 
imitation of Spenser, ambles carelessly along at 
his own sweet will, and then feels hurt when the 
poem fails. "I doubt if your magazine," he 
writes the editor, "will become really popular if 
you edit it for the mob." The implication is too 
evident to be missed. His letters, delightful 
though^ they are, give us no penetrating psycho- 



LOWELL: THE MAN AND THE WRITER 41 

logical glimpses of men or women he knew. Even 
when writing of his father, of whom his knowledge 
must have been the most intimate, he gets no 
deeper than his simplicity and magnanimity. It 
will be interesting to keep all this in mind when 
studying Lowell's critical essays. 

Here is Lowell then, with his moods, grave or 
gay; his sensitiveness to impressions, which be- 
came at times so acute as to objectify his imagin- 
ings; a susceptibility to the beauty of women and 
to the responsive sympathy of their nature; a 
need of stimulation from outside himself; an 
enthusiasm which was not dampened even with 
changes of opinion; abiding conservatism and a 
knowledge of human nature which was limited — 
the offspring of multitudinous books rather than 
of contact with men. 



CHAPTER II 

THE RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 

ALL his life Lowell was a voluminous reader. 
In college he ''made friendships" with books 
*'that have lasted me for life." He covered 
"such diverse works as Terence, Hume, Smollett, 
the Anthologia Graeca, Hakluyt, Boileau, Scott, 
and Southey. "' This bent for reading continued 
all his life. He wrote in 1854: "I am one of 
the last of the great readers," and adds that he 
studied "an incredible number of hours" every 
day. He had a large fund of intellectual curiosity, 
for as early as 1836 he said: "Milton has excited 
my ambition to read all the Greek and Latin 
classics which he did." 

In Greek and Latin he received a good training 
at Mr. Wells' school and he continued these 
studies all through college. In fact, Latin, Greek, 
and mathematics were the chief studies in the 
curriculimi at Harvard in Lowell's time. He 
seems to have had a good command of these lan- 
guages although he protested strongly that the 

^ Scudder, i., 32 

42 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 43 

great authors of antiquity should not be "degraded 
from teachers of thinking to drillers in grammar, 
and made the ruthless pedagogues of root and 
inflection, instead of companions for whose society 
the mind must put on her highest mood. . . . 
What concern have we with the shades of dialect 
in Homer or Theocritus, provided they speak the 
spiritual lingua franca that abolishes all alienage of 
race, and makes whatever shore of time we land 
on hospitable and homelike?"^ This last sen- 
tence throws light on Lowell's attitude towards 
all literatures: they are great in so far as they 
appeal to what is universal in men by transcending 
the bounds of time and place and circumstance. 
The classic tongues are not dead, since in them so 
much that is hving has been written.^ They 
are surcharged with life as ''perhaps no other 
writing, except Shakespeare's, ever was or will be." 
How great are Plato and Aristotle ! They are the 
masters of those who know. Greek literature 
is "the most fruitful comment on oiu* own." 
Translation from the Greek into English, he says, 
is invaluable for securing a mastery of our own 
tongue, and he inquires what great mind since 
the Renaissance has failed to be satiu-ated with 
Greek literature. 

The Greeks, he asserts, "must furnish us with 
our standard of comparison," and from their 
literature more clearly than from any other source 

* Works, iii., 33. ^ Ihid., vi., 165. 



44 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

are to be deduced "the laws of proportion, of 
design." He maintains that the persistence of 
poets in endeavoring to reproduce Greek tragedy 
is owing to a superstition regarding Greek and 
Latin which is a heritage from the revival of 
learning. The ''simple and downright way of 
thinking" of the Greeks, "loses all its savor when 
we assume it to ourselves by an effort of thought. " ^ 

Lowell would not be understood as denying the 
value or the beauty of Greek tragedy. His 
insistence was on our making literature the 
immediate reflex of a civilization in which, with 
its manifold phases, we have a share and in which, 
ultimately, we put our faith. There is no art 
without life; no life without a simple faith in the 
times of which it is the expression. Greek drama 
was "primarily Greek and secondarily human," 
and though it makes a steady appeal yields an 
even wider dominion to Shakespearean tragedy.^ 
"There is nothing in ancient art to match Shake- 
speare." ^ 

Lowell finds Aristophanes to be "beyond ques- 
tion the highest type of pure comedy, " and brings 
home his contention about the perennially human 
in Greek literature, by declaring that he is "by 
the vital and essential qualities of his humorous 
satire . . . more nearly our contemporary than 
Moli^re. "4 Por ^schylus he has intense regard, 

* Works, ii,, 136. =» Ibid., iv., 232, and iii., 65. 

3 Ibid., i., 212. 4 Ibid., iii., 64. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 45 

declaring that he "soars over the other Greek 
tragedians Hke an eagle."' Nearly all the refer- 
ences in Lowell to Greek literature are concerned 
with ^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aris- 
tophanes. His intimacy with thece appears in his 
essay on Shakespeare, where he points out similari- 
ties between their dramas and Shakespeare's, and 
cites parallel passages, quoting from the original 
Greek. Lowell gives frequent mention to Homer, 
and tells us that he prefers the Odyssey to the Iliad; 
but he goes into no serious discussion as to the 
sotu*ces of Homer's power. 

Lowell evidently did not get to feel that final 
intimacy with Greek which makes a language part 
of oneself; for he speaks of divining a certain 
resemblance between Shakespeare and ^schylus 
"through the mists of a language which will not 
let me be sure of what I see. "^ 

While Lowell praised highly the study of Latin 
as well as of Greek, he expresses no uncertain 
opinion about Latin literature in his essay on 
Chaucer : 

It may well be doubted whether Roman literature, 
always a half-hardy exotic, could ripen the seeds 
of living reproduction. The Roman genius was 
eminently practical and far more apt for the triumphs 
of politics and jurisprudence than of art. Supreme 
elegance it could and did arrive at in Virgil, but ... 

^ WorkSf ii., 126. * Ibid., iii., 45. 



46 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

it produced but one original poet . . . Horace . . . 
There are a half dozen pieces of Catullus unsurpassed 
... for lyric grace and fanciful tenderness . . . 
One profound imagination, one man, who with a 
more prosperous subject might have been a great poet, 
lifted Roman literature above its ordinary level of 
tasteful common-sense.^ 

This poet was Lucretius. Horace was the "poet 
of social life," whose best work had point, com- 
pactness, and urbane tone. He pierces through 
the hedge of language and, a cosmopolitan, makes 
a wide appeal.^ Virgil had art and power "not 
only of being strong in parts, but of making those 
parts coherent in an harmonious whole and tribu- 
tary to it." Tacitus is mentioned several times 
in a way that suggests how intimate was Lowell's 
knowledge of his work. Ovid was apparently not 
a favorite with the critic, who declared that if the 
poet "instead of sentimentalizing in the Tristia 
had left behind him a treatise on the language of 
the Getae ... we should have thanked him for 
something more truly valuable than all his poems."' 
But he is alive to Ovid's influence: "The only 
Latin poet who can be supposed to have influenced 
the spirit of medieval literature is Ovid."^ In a 
letter to C. E. Norton, he expressed satisfaction on 
studying Lucan again, "since I bethought me for 

^ Works, iii., 305 ff. ' Ibid., il, 252; iv., 282; 266. 

i Ibid., i., 121. * Ibid., iii., $01. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 47 

the first time that Lucan was the true protoge- 
nist of the concettisti.''^ In much the same way, 
when speaking of modem sentiment aHsm, Lowell 
suggests that a tendency towards it began with 
Euripides and Ovid. As in the case of the Greek 
writers, so too with the Latins : Lowell always has 
them within ready reach of his retentive memory. 
This fine memory of Lowell's was indeed a sine 
qua non for one who was to acquire a knowledge of 
languages as wide as his. His acquaintance with 
French, German, Italian, and Spanish, he perfected 
by residence in Europe which extended in all over 
many years. He gave courses at various times 
during his professorship in German, Spanish, Old 
French, and in Dante. He went thoroughly into 
the Early English Text Society's series and wrote 
in 1874: 

I have now reached the point where I feel sure enough 
of myself in Old French and Old English to make my 
corrections with a pen instead of a pencil as I go 
along. Ten hours a day, on an average, I have been 
at it for the last two months, and get so absorbed 
that I turn grudgingly to anything else. 

German, Lowell wrote in 1875, "^^ the open 
sesame to a large culture. " It made many things 
in English literature clearer to him and was very 
interesting for its own sake. To only one German 

* Letters, ii., 333. Allusions like those in Letters, i., 14, 367, 
377, and 396 are eloquent of Lowell's intimacy with the classics. 



48 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

writer, however, did Lowell devote a literary study : 
he contributed an article on Lessing to the North 
American Review for April, 1867. Goethe he 
alludes to frequently and in a way which shows a 
close knowledge and a deep admiration. Lowell 
calls him ''the last of the great poets,*' and the 
"most widely receptive of critics"; but he "often 
fails in giving artistic coherence to his longer 
works. ' ' ' Though the ' ' figtire of Goethe is grand ' ' 
and "rightfully preeminent," Lowell gives us no 
study of him — only obiter dicta. The occasional 
reference to Schiller or Richter or Heine, with his 
"airy humor ' ' and * ' sense of form ' ' and ' * profound 
pathos," only surprises one the more at the com- 
paratively slight impression which German liter- 
ature seems to have made on Lowell.^ 

German scholarship he regarded with divided 
feelings. He acknowledged the " admirable thor- 
oughness of the German intellect," which has 
"supplied the raw material in almost every branch 
of science for the defter wits of other nations to 
work on . " But German criticism, * ' by way of being 
profound, too often burrows in delighted darkness 
quite beneath its subject, till the reader feels the 
ground hollow beneath him, and is fearful of cav- 
ing into unknown depths of stagnant metaphysic 
air at every step. ' ' ^ Yet he finds German criticism 

^ Works, ii., 167. 

* Cf. Publications of the Mod. Lang. Ass'n of America, vol. vii., 
p. 25 ff. 3 Works, ii., 163. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 49 

preeminent in penetration though ''seldom lucid 
and never entertaining. It may turn its light, if we 
have patience, into every obscurest cranny of its 
subject . . . but it never flashes light out of the 
subject itself, as Sainte-Beuve ... so often does, 
and with such unexpected charm."' 

In the field of French literature, Rousseau repre- 
sents Lowell's only essay. But his work neverthe- 
less is rich in allusions and comparisons such as 
wotild be possible only to one to whom French 
literature was an intimate possession. This is 
especially true in his essay on Dryden where in dis- 
cussing French versification he points out defects 
in lines from Comeille's Cinna, which ''Voltaire 
. . . does not notice ... in his minute comment 
on this play"; in his essay on Pope and in that on 
Chaucer, where his knowledge of Old French liter- 
ature is made to throw light upon the interesting 
question of Chaucer's indebtedness "for poetical 
suggestion or literary culture." When he comes 
to discuss the sounding of final and medial e in 
Chaucer, he at once appeals to Marie de France 
and Wace and the Roman de la Rose. 

Of his Da7ite, his longest and most ambitious 
essay in criticism, Lowell said it was the result 
of twenty years of study. On reading the essay 
one cannot but be impressed with the amount of 
matter he has accumulated. One begins to under- 
stand why his Dante classes at college were his 

^ Works, ii., 166. 

4 



50 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

best. He has left no point iintouched, from a 
consideration of German, French, and English 
studies of Dante, down to a suggestion that Dante 
may have been influenced by the doctrine of the 
Oriental Sufis. Lowell's admiration for the great 
poet is eloquent throughout the essay. As for 
Petrarch, poet and humanist, the critic concedes 
to him a wide influence on modem literature, due 
to the "charm of elegance," but finds his famous 
sonnets inferior to those of Michael Angelo. 
Petrarch he calls the first great sentimentalist, 
whose emotion demands of us to shiver before a 
painted flame. ^ Boccaccio receives scarcely a 
mention save as the biographer of Dante. But in 
a letter to Norton, Lowell says : 

I have read Boccaccio nearly through since commence- 
ment — I mean the Decameron, in order to appreciate 
his style. I find it very charming, and him clearly 
the forerunner of modern prose. A singular sweet- 
ness, ease, and grace. Nothing came near it for 
centuries. 

Just as in Italian literature Lowell was con- 
cerned with the great figures, so too in the liter- 
atiu-e of Spain. His Spanish course at Harvard 
was concerned mostly with Don Quixote. He 
devoted, strange to say, none of his essays to 
Spanish literature, and the address on Don Quixote 
at the Working Men's College, London, is little 

* Works, ii., 253 ff. passim. 



RANGE OF LOWELL»S KNOWLEDGE 51 

more than a ''few illustrative comments on his one 
immortal book." If Lowell knew his Cervantes 
more minutely than his Calderon, the dramatist is 
closer to his heart. ^ As a dramatist: "For fasci- 
nation of style and profound suggestion, it would 
be hard to name another author superior to Cal- 
deron, if indeed equal to him."* He writes in one 
of his letters: ''Calderon is surely one of the most 
marvelous of poets," and again as late as 1890: 
"There are greater poets, but none so constantly 
delightful." That Spanish dramatist whose fec- 
undity has always been a marvel, is passed over 
in all but utter silence. The most Lowell has to 
say about him occurs in a letter written in 1889: 
"I have done some reading in Lope de Vega, but 
am not drawn to him or by him as to and by Cal- 
deron. Yet he is wonderful too in his way. " 

There can be no doubt about the advantages 
which a knowledge of many literatures brought to 
Lowell.^ It gave him an opportunity to secure 
standards for judgment and bases for comparison. 
But the comparisons are seldom expressed except 
in ohiter fashion. Shakespeare's use of language is 
compared with that of the Greek tragedians; 
Greek drama with the modem; Shakespeare with 

^ Vide "Nightingale in the Study," Poetical Works, iii., 282. 

2 Works, vi., 116. 

3 " I think that to know the Hterature of another language . . . 
gives us the prime benefits of foreign travel." — Latest Literary 
Essays, p. 139. 



52 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Dante as to preeminent qualities; Voltaire with 
Pope ''as an author with whom the gift of writing 
was primary and that of verse secondary"; Chau- 
cer and Dante are compared and contrasted — the 
most ambitious of these ventures. But these and 
similar instances by their very infrequency only 
impress one with what might be and is not. For 
the most part Lowell's comparisons are of writers 
within the same literature and that in English, 
as Milton with Shakespeare, Dry den with Pope, 
Byron with Wordsworth and Keats. He wearies 
quickly of sustained comparison and seems eager 
to have done with it. Usually the reference to a 
second literature is to furnish either an illustration 
of a single quality in the writer under discussion or 
a quotation bearing on the point at issue. He 
says for example : Dryden's ^'obiter dicta have often 
the penetration, and always more than the equity, 
of Voltaire's, for Dry den never loses temper, and 
never altogether qualifies his judgment by his self- 
love. "' Lowell, like Goethe, regards Samson 
Agonistes as the "most successful attempt at 
reproducing the Greek tragedy." He adds: 
"Goethe admits that it alone, among modem 
works, has caught life from the breath of the 
antique spirit."'' The I phi genie, Lowell implies, 
is a failure. But he does not compare Milton's 
drama directly with Goethe's to show the reason 
why, although such a comparison would have 

* Works, iii., 179. ' Ibid., ii., 133. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 53 

tended to bring out clearly the reasons for Milton's 
success and Goethe's failure, and to lend more 
color to the critic's contention that the employ- 
ment of essentially Greek subjects or the imitation 
of Greek forms is foredoomed to failure. With 
such exceptional equipment as Lowell possessed, 
it seems strange that he did not venture further 
than the mere confines of comparative criticism. 
It may be that he deliberately held back. 

Outside of English literatirre, his allusions to 
important figures of the nineteenth century are 
mostly confined to the French, and these are scant 
enough: Victor Hugo is the ''greatest living 
representative" of sentiment alism, and, ''con- 
vinced that, as founder of the French Romantic 
School, there is a kind of family likeness between 
himself and Shakespeare, stands boldly forth to 
prove the father as extravagant as the son. "^ 
Sainte-Beuve makes his subject luminous^; Balzac 
(who gets no mention in his works) is said in his 
letters to yield "to the temptation of melodrama" 
and to be inferior to Charles de Bernard in knowl- 
edge of the great world. ^ 

In English literature Lowell has turned his 
attention somewhat to the nineteenth century and 
has come down beyond Keats and Wordsworth to 
consider a few of his contemporaries. But Carlyle, 
Thoreau, Swinburne, and Landor were by no means 
his most important essays either in length or in 

^ Works, iii., 63. ' Ibid., ii., 166. 3 Letters^ ii., 429. 



54 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

soundness of judgment. His attention was cen- 
tred upon established classics and that atten- 
tion, as shown in his essays, was for the most 
part devoted to the classics of English literature in 
the domain of poetry. 

From Chaucer down his essays on the great poets 
form a history of English poetical literattire. 
Beginning with Chaucer he has sketched that 
poet's sources "for poetical suggestion or literary 
culture: the Latins, the Troubadours, the Trou- 
v^res, and the Italians," and in the course of the 
essay touches on Gower and Langland. In 
Spenser he goes into a consideration of English 
poetry from the death of Chaucer to the rise of 
Spenser. The fifteenth century is a barren waste 
to Lowell's mind. " On the whole, Scottish poetry 
of the fifteenth century has more meat in it than 
the English," and he pauses to consider Dunbar, 
Barbour, and Gawain Douglas. He then takes 
up Skelton, Gascoigne, Wyatt, and Siurey, whose 
verse is "fiat, thin, and regular," touches on the 
ballad, discusses Sidney, bestows considerable 
space and praise on Drayton and Daniel, and then, 
after this rapid survey in twenty pages, is ready for 
a lengthy consideration of Spenser. Taking up 
next the study of Shakespeare, Lowell touches 
upon the condition of things in the poet's time : the 
exhilaration which followed the Reformation, 
the dissemination of knowledge through printing, 
the stimulus of discovery across the virgin seas, — 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 55 

those influences, in a word, which went to make 
the English nation vibrant with energy. The 
language was vital, the medium of expression for 
big hearts and keen brains ; and in London among 
the set that created on the stage of the metropolis 
a new world of Fancy, Shakespeare got to know 
the very wellsprings of speech. ^ The moment was 
auspicious, says Lowell, and the greatest of poets 
came as the culmination of one of the greatest of 
hterary eras. Milton follows and bridges over 
the seventeenth century between Shakespeare and 
Dry den. Lowell, with his eye on Masson, pays 
less attention than in the essays on Chaucer, 
Spenser, and Shakespeare to connecting his poet 
with the preceding era. In Dryden he returns to 
the breadth of view of the literary historian. He 
points out that the author of Absalom and Achito- 
phel had fallen upon an age when that moral dis- 
integration was in process which was to result in 
scepticism; that Dryden was the ''first of the 
modems"; that he recognized the Time-Spirit 
and to a great extent worshipped at its shrine. 
In Pope the critic goes back to the Restoration, 
pointing out the imitation of "French manners, 
French morals, and, above all, French taste. "^ 
French taste and French principles of criticism 
tritmiphed in England, he declares, chiefly through 
the championship of Dryden. ^ But the upheaval 
of allegiance and political ideas had left English 

^ Works, iii., 7 ff. ^ Jbid., iv., 11. 3 Ibid., iv., 16. 



56 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

minds open to the influx of new — and French — 
ideas. Precision and finesse usurped the place 
of imagination. ReHgion became a badge of 
party; scepticism lay at the root of faith.' We 
now have the age of Pope. Thus far, among 
the great English poets who preceded him, we 
have seen ''actual life represented by Chaucer, 
imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by Shake- 
speare, the interior life by Milton; . . . conven- 
tional life . . . found or made a most fitting 
[poet] in Pope."^' 

In Gray, Lowell gives a backward glance at 
Milton and at Dryden who, though only twenty- 
three years yotinger than Milton, ''belongs to 
another world." Dryden, already the subject of 
an earlier essay, is too interesting a figure in 
Lowell's eyes to be passed over in silence, and 
after touching on his style and his manner, the 
critic points out the self-satisfaction, the moral 
elbowroom, the acceptance of things as they are, 
which belonged to the eighteenth century. With 
all its supposed lack of inspiration, the century 
produced Addison and Pope, Fielding and Sterne, 
Goldsmith and Gray. "Toward the middle of 
the century . . . two books were published . . . 
Dodsley's Old Plays (1744) ^^nd Percy's Ballads 
(1765)," which "gave the first impulse to the 
romantic reaction against a miscalled classicism, 
and were the seed of the literary renaissance."^ 

^ Works ^ iv., 19. 2 Ibid,^ iv., 25. 3 Latest Literary Essays, p. 1 2 . 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 57 

Wordsworth and Keats bring the history of EngHsh 
poetic literature into the nineteenth century. 

All this is of value and one gets from a study of 
these essays a wide general view of the history 
of English poetical literature from Chaucer down. 
One feels throughout that Lowell has read every 
poet he discusses, however far he may be from 
the main highway of poetry. But one may charge 
the critic with vagueness of expression if not of 
thought, with lack of consecuity in arrangement 
of matter, with contradictions, omissions, and 
errors which one finds it sometimes difficult to 
distinguish as of fact or of judgment. He speaks, 
for example, of the "amalgamation of the Saxon, 
Norman, and scholarly elements of English" 
being brought about by the Elizabethan stage, 
and declares that Shakespeare was "doubly for- 
ttinate" in being "Saxon by the father and Nor- 
man by the mother."' One draws the inference 
that there still existed about the last quarter of the 
sixteenth century a divorce between the Saxon 
and Norman elements in blood and speech. One 
feels awakened in one's mind an lui comfortable 
doubt about Lowell's historical accuracy; a con- 
viction that he had forgotten Chaucer, in whom 
"we see the first result of the Norman yeast upon 
the home-baked Saxon loaf, " and who "found his 
native tongue a dialect and left it a language."^ 
In Dryden, the critic gives a false impression of the 

^ WorkSf iii., 7. ' Ibid., iii.,321 and 329. 



58 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

facts of literary history when he says: "In 1678, 
the public mind had so far recovered its [moral] 
tone that Dryden's comedy of Limberham was 
barely tolerated for three nights." To leave this 
statement uncircumstanced is to make it almost 
impossible to imderstand how Vanbrugh's Relapse 
could have triumphed on the London stage in 1696. 
In Pope Lowell first discusses the Romantic move- 
ment of the eighteenth century; then turns for 
a page to Pope who was lauded by Voltaire and 
whose fame was European; then refers to conti- 
nental Romanticism; next discusses the school of 
Boileau, a topic which reminds him that "a 
century earlier the School of Cultists had estab- 
lished a dominion." The Cultists next engage 
his attention; they had their day and "went down 
before the implacable good sense of French criti- 
cism"; an analogy exists between cultism and 
the style of Pope, for whose arrival "circumstances 
had prepared the way." Then follows a dis- 
cussion of the Restoration, of English sensitiveness 
to ridicule as shown even in Shakespeare's time, 
and of Caroline licentiousness. Next Dryden 
is taken up and the sceptical turn of the later 
seventeenth century; the influence of French 
criticism on the English literature of the day is 
gone into, correctness is touched on, and at last, 
after twenty-four pages, we come to the main 
point — a consideration of Pope. Such lack of 
consecuity does not impugn Lowell's knowledge, 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 59 

which in its important phases is sound ; but it does 
tend to lessen its value to the reader, who not 
unnaturally comes to suspect as but partially 
assimilated that knowledge which is presented in 
so confused a way. 

Sins of omission and errors of fact are not want- 
ing in Lowell. The importance of the Lyrical 
Ballads is passed over with the remark that they 
attempted a reform in poetry.^ The famous 
Prefaces gain no consideration beyond the state- 
ment that Wordsworth shifted his ground some- 
what in theory and notably in practice. ^^ Lowell 
says nothing about Wordsworth's place in that 
Romantic Movement which, taking its rise during 
the eighteenth century, tiurned to the full tide 
at the beginning of the nineteenth. The place 
which belongs to Wordsworth in the forefront of 
the movement is given to Keats, who is called "the 
first resolute and wilful heretic, the true founder 
of the modern school, which admits no cis-Eliza- 
bethan authority save Milton. "^ it would be 
interesting to know on what grounds Lowell would 
defend this concession to Keats to the exclusion of 
Coleridge and Wordsworth. He is constantly 
expressing opinions which he lays down with a 
finality as of fact. When he says, "Dryden was 
the first Englishman who wrote perfectly easy 

^ Works, iv., 302. * Ihid., i., 245. 

3 Ihid., iii.,98. In Works, {., 245, he says that Keats' reaction 
was an "unconscious expression." 



6o LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

prose, "^ one wonders why he ignored Cowley. 
But such lapses belong properly to another chapter. 
They are valuable in this place only as showing 
that Lowell's knowledge — and there can be no 
question of its amplitude — did not save him from 
error. 

Errors of fact or of judgment did not come 
from ignorance of other critical dicta than his own. 
One finds echoes of De Quincey, of Lamb, and of 
Hazlitt, and so many of Coleridge as to convince 
one that Lowell had steeped his mind in the work 
of that master of criticism. Sometimes it is a 
hint of Coleridge's which Lowell uses, as when he 
compares Spenser and Bimyan in their allegories. 
Coleridge, in speaking of Spenser, refers to Bimyan 
and says that "in the Pilgrim's Progress . . . the 
characters are real persons with nicknames."^ 
Says Lowell: "The vast superiority of Bunyan 
over Spenser lies in the fact that we help make 
his allegory out of our own experience. " ^ The 
essays on Wordsworth and Shakespeare are 
xmder constant obligation to Coleridge. Cole- 
ridge speaks of the "frequent curiosa felicitas 
of his (Wordsworth's) diction," as a "beauty . . . 
eminently characteristic of his poetry.""* Says 
Lowell: Wordsworth's work is endowed "with 
an unexpectedness and impressiveness of origi- 
nality such as we feel in the presence of Nature 

^ Works, ii., 221. 2 Coleridge's Works, iv., 247 and 248. 

3 Lowell's Works, iv., 322. " Coleridge's Works, iii.,491. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 6i 

herself ' ' ; this is ' ' a pecuHarity of his. " ' Speaking 
of Wordsworth in another place Coleridge says: 
He uses ''thoughts and images too great for the 
subject."* Says Lowell, after quoting from Peter 
Bell: "One cannot help thinking that the similes 
of the huge stone, the sea beast, and the cloud, . . . 
are somewhat too lofty for the service to which 
they are put. "3 In Shakespeare, howelVs indebt- 
edness is none the less evident. Coleridge calls 
Prospero ''the very Shakespeare himself, of the 
tempest. ""* Lowell asks: "In Prospero shall we 
not recognize the Artist himself [Shakespeare] ?" ^ 
Says Coleridge: "In other writers we find the 
particular opinions of the individual; . . . but 
Shakespeare never promulgates any party tenets. 
He is always the philosopher and the moralist."^ 
Says Lowell: "In estimating Shakespeare, it 
shotdd never be forgotten, that ... he was 
essentially observer and artist, and incapable of 
partisanship. " 7 

To consider but one more critic to whom Lowell 
is under obligation. His declaration regarding 
character as "the only soil in which real mental 
power can root itself and find sustenance," recalls 
Carlyle's: "Who ever saw, or will see, any true 
talent, not to speak of genius, the foundation of 

^ Lowell's Works, iv., 407. ^ Coleridge's Works, iii., 478. 

3 Lowell's Works, iv., 410. 4 Coleridge's Works, iv., 75. 

s Lowell's Works, iii., 61. ^ Coleridge's Works, iv., 78. 
7 Lowell's Works, iii., 2. 



62 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

which is not goodness, love?"' Says Carlyle: 
"Johnson's opinions are fast becoming obsolete: 
but his style of thinking and of living, we may 
hope, will never become obsolete."^ Lowell prob- 
ably had that in mind when he wrote: "It is as a 
nobly original man, even more than as an original 
thinker, that Lessing is precious to us, and that 
he is so considerable in German literature. In a 
higher sense, but in the same kind, he is to Ger- 
mans what Dr. Johnson is to us, — admirable for 
what he was."^ Considering Rousseau the senti- 
mentalist and finding it difficult to accoimt for 
his imdeniable influence, Lowell exclaims: "Surely 
there must have been a basis of sincerity in this 
man seldom matched. ""* Says Carlyle: "With all 
his drawbacks . . . [Rousseau] has the first and 
chief characteristic of a hero: he is heartily in 
earnest. ''^ And so one might go on. 

One would hesitate to draw the conclusion that 
Lowell consciously borrowed/ He was, as a 
matter of fact, scrupulous about literary borrowing 
although it was a favorite belief of his that an 
idea belonged to him who expressed it best. His 
reading was enormous and he doubtless imcon- 
sciously assimilated phrases and dicta and com- 

^ Carlyle's Works, xvi., 467. ^ Ihid., xiv., 404. 

3 Lowell's Works, ii., 229. •♦ Ibid., ii., 237. 

5 Carlyle's Works, xiv., 406. 

^ He is charged with plagiarism in an article in Lippincott's, 
vol. vii., p. 641 ff. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 63 

parisons which grew into his consciousness as his 
own possessions. For borrowings however on 
the part of others, especially of words and turns 
of phrase, Lowell had a sense so keen as to amount 
almost to an obsession. The following is typical; 
he quotes Dryden's lines : 

"And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove. 
Kept idle thunder in his lifted hand," 

and adds in a footnote : 

Perhaps the hint was given by a phrase of Corneille, 
mo7tarque en peinture. Dryden . . . borrowed a great 
deal. Thus in Don Sebastian (of suicide) : 

"Brutus and Cato might discharge their souls. 
And give them furloughs for the other world; 
But we, like sentries, are obliged to stand 
In starless nights and wait the appointed hour." 

The thought is Cicero's, but how it is intensified by 
the ''starless nights"! Dryden, I suspect, got it 
from his favorite, Montaigne, who says, "Que nous 
ne pouvons abandonner cette garnison du monde, sans 
le commandement exprez de celuy qui nous y a mis." 
(L. ii.. Chap. 3,) In the same play, by a very Dryden- 
ish verse, he gives new force to an old comparison : 

"And I should break through laws divine and human, 
And think 'em cobwebs spread for little man, 
Which all the bulky herd of Nature breaks."^ 

^ Works, iii., 141. 



64 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

There is an interesting and tempting play for the 
analogical side of memory in this sort of "hunting 
of the letter," but the genuine value of it is more 
than doubtful. Its absurdity becomes apparent 
in such a case as that where Lowell, referring to 
Dryden's "painted Jove," suspects "that this 
noble image was suggested by a verse in The 
Double Marriage [of Beaumont and Fletcher] — 
'Thou woven Worthy in a piece of arras.' "' 
This tendency of Lowell's adds new proof — if 
any were wanting — of the range of his reading 
and of his keen sense for the "minutiae of verbal 
criticism." 

This sense found a more profitable channel 
when, supported by his intimate and wide ac- 
quaintance with languages and by his remarkable 
memory, it was directed into the field of linguistics. 
Lowell's knowledge of linguistics was derived 
from diligent reading in the classics of language. 
To him language was nothing if not intensely 
alive. And a "living language" with Lowell 
meant one "that is still hot from the hearts and 
brains of a people, not hardened yet, but moltenly 
ductile to new shapes of sharp and clean relief 
in the moulds of new thought."^ As a student of 
linguistics, his most thorough-going efforts appear 
in Library of Old Authors and in the introduction 
to Part II of the Biglow Papers. There is no call 
to go into a minute examination of the etymolo- 

^ Latest Literary Essays, p. i8 (note). ' Works, iii., 6. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 65 

gies which Lowell discusses. What most con- 
cerns our present study is that he grasped some 
important principles which lie at the root of the 
science of language and that he applied them in 
an illuminating way in many of his essays. 

It is only from its roots in the living generations 
of men that a language can be reinforced with fresh 
vigor for its needs. . . . No language after it has 
faded into diction, none that cannot suck up the feed- 
ing juices secreted for it in the rich mother-earth of 
common folk, can bring forth a sound and lusty book. 
True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pass from 
page to page, but from man to man, where the brain 
is kindled and the lips suppled by downright living 
interests and by passion in its very throe. ^ 

Another principle which he has applied in tracing 
etymology, is a regard for exact chronology; a 
third, the value of comparing later forms in order 
to infer earlier ones. It is the first principle with 
which Lowell was most concerned and on which 
he was never tired of insisting. Of Dry den, to 
whose prose he gives unfailing praise, he says: 
"What he did in his best writing was to use the 
English as if it were a spoken, and not merely an 
inkhorn language."^ Again: ''[Language's] being 
alive is all that gives it poetic value. We do not 
mean what is technically called a living language, 
. . . but one that is still hot from the hearts and 

^Poetical Works, ii., 159. ^ Works^ iii., 185. 

5 



66 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

brains of a people."' The motto of poets should 
be, he adds, "The tongue of the people in the 
mouth of the scholar." With this principle in 
mind, he never fails to discuss in an illuminating 
way the diction of poets and the growth of his 
mother tongue. His knowledge of words enabled 
him to take issue with Masson regarding several 
points in Milton's versification and to invoke in 
support of his contentions Shakespeare, Dekker, 
Donne, Italian usage, and Milton himself. His 
interest is not due to a desire to quibble, but 
rather to defend Milton and the Elizabethans and 
especially Shakespeare from the charge of faulty 
versification. Chaucer as well as Shakespeare 
was too genuine a poet, to Lowell's mind, to have 
left his prosody in a chaotic condition. In Chau- 
cer 's case he discusses final and medial e, the 
restoration of final n in the infinitive and third 
person pliural of verbs, and plays the part of 
editor in scattered passages in a way to convince 
one of his judgment and his knowledge of versi- 
fication. * 

With commentators or editors who brought 
only imperfect qualifications to their task, he had 
little patience. Carelessness he regards, if possible, 
as even more inexcusable. After pointing out in 
Library of Old Authors various errors of W. C. 

* Works, iii., 6. 

• Lowell edited the texjt of Donne's poems, published by the 
Rowfant Club in 1895. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 67 

Hazlitt, he adds: "Where there is blundering to 
be done, one stone often serves Mr. Hazlitt for 
two birds," an amenity which is typical of his 
attitude throughout the paper. And yet Lowell 
himself, like Homer, som.e times nods. It is 
pointed out that he attributes to Shakespeare the 
lines of Richard Bamfield: 

** King Pandion he is dead; 
All thy friends are lapt in lead."^ 

Devotee of Shakespeare as he was, such a slip is 
all the more surprising.^ He speaks of our being 
"the miserable forked radish, to which the bitter 
scorn of Lear degraded every child of Adam,"^ 
whereas even Macaulay's schoolboy knows it is 
honest Jack Falstaff, not Lear, who may claim 
the phrase. He misquotes Prior's Abra^ and 
Daniel, xii., 3. s These last three lapses occur in 
addresses, which, however, must have been revised 
before publication. In essays written directly 
for the press he sometimes misquotes,^ and by a 

^ Greenslet, p. 291. 

2 Commenting on the American slang "to let slide," Lowell 
points out that it occurs in Heywood's Edward IV., etc., but 
says nothing about its occurrence in Shakespeare's Taming of 
the Shrew. Vide Introduction to Biglow Papers, p. 188. 

3 Works,, vi., 80. 4 Ihid., vi., 72. s Ihid., vi., 98. 

^For misquotations of Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and Shake- 
speare, vide A Free Lance, p. 150 ff. Lowell misquotes Bums in 
Conversations, p. 174, and assigns a quotation from Dekker to 
Middleton in Early Writings^ p. 244. 



68 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

strange irony he is guilty of two slips in the case 
of final e in quoting Chaucer and that after demand- 
ing careful consideration for e as important in 
determining versification. His fondness for minute 
criticism gets to some extent its revenge. Slips 
in the vernacular were pet objects of his attack; 
he corrects Masson's "dislike to " ; sneers at Hazlitt 
for speaking of the ''delineation of a point"; 
questions Halliwell about a relative whose ante- 
cedent is vague. ^ 

When the question concerned literature, Lowell 
could be insistent on minute points with better 
grace than when history or science or art was under 
discussion. His interest was vastly more devoted 
to letters than to kindred subjects and the result 
was imfortunate. One thinks how effective his 
Shakespeare might have been made, if Elizabethan 
England with its splendid vigor had been boldly 
drawn, that England when men fltmg velvet 
cloaks before the feet of their Virgin Queen ; when 
lusty mariners, who might have dared the terrors 
of strange seas with Drake or Frobisher, thronged 
the Globe to see old Shylock rage or Romeo die; 
when the wits of Oxford and Cambridge could 
live their dissolute lives, write masterpieces, and 
meet death in a brothel. Knowing history, he 
might have pictured the England of Elizabeth or 
of Chaucer or of the Restoration with that vivid- 

^ Sentences occur in Lowell not uncommonly, whose syntax is 
baffling if not quite indefensible. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 69 

ness so gripping in the studies of Macaulay. His 
Chaucer, his Shakespeare, his Dry den, and the rest 
leave the poets too far aloof from their times; or 
rather to Lowell their existence in literattire and 
in history are things apart. One recalls such an 
essay as Macaulay's on the Dramatists of the Res- 
toration and at once that society which Dryden 
knew, dissolute, voluptuous, debonair, flashes on 
one's mind and makes the literature of the reign 
of the second Charles clear in a way which shames 
Lowell's mere statement: "Charles II. had brought 
back with him from exile French manners, French 
morals, and above all French taste." And Milton's 
England ! Lowell must devote over a third of his 
essay on Milton to flaying Masson — too easy 
prey — while those pregnant days when King and 
Parliament grew tense for the death-grapple; 
and a great nation was rent with Civil War; and 
Puritan prayed and Cavalier sang; and Falkland 
and Montrose fought and died the death; and 
Oliver won Marston Moor and Dunbar and came 
to dominate England for a generation — those 
great days when John Milton's blood tingled 
through his veins, seem to have lain, as far as 
Lowell was concerned, hidden in the dust of the 
past. A knowledge of history would have given 
his critical essays a far greater value ; they would 
have been more consecutive in tracing literary 
movements, more convincing and clear because 
showing the interactions of literary with his- 



70 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

torical changes; and finally more vital, because 
the author discussed would appear as a part of 
his age and not merely as a superman set against 
a nebulous background. 

At the age of twenty-six, writing to a friend, 
Lowell speaks of having gone into many out-of- 
the-way books, without having glanced at others 
which every one had read. ''For example,. I 
have read books on magic and astrology and yet 
never looked into a History of England."' It 
has already been suggested that one gets from 
Lowell's treatment of literary development the 
impression that his ideas of history were vague. 
He seems to believe, for instance, that the gallicism 
of the Restoration impregnated the English 
nation, instead of making it clear that its influence 
centred in the capital, the court, and such liter- 
ary men as came within the sphere of court 
influence.^ In speaking of the low standards of 
morality and honor which prevailed in England 
in the age which was supplanting Milton's, he 
says : It was an age 

when men could . . . swear one allegiance and keep 
on safe terms with the other, when prime-ministers 
and commanders-in-chief could be intelligencers of 
the Pretender, nay, when even Algernon Sidney him- 
self could be a pensioner of France. ^ 

^ Letter s^ i., 90. 

2 Works, iv., Essay on Pope. 3 Ibid., iv., 19. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 71 

While Lowell has not made here any positive 
misstatement, the confusion in the implication is 
great. He has started out to speak of the age 
which was supplanting Milton's. The introduc- 
tion of the Pretender shifts the focus from the 
Restoration to the age of Anne, and the reader 
recalls with a shock of surprise that Sidney, in- 
troduced on the heels of the "intelligencers of the 
Pretender," was dead five years before James 
Stuart was bom.' One reads with similar feel- 
ings, ''For Italy Dante is the thirteenth centtuy."^ 
It is a question how much Italian history must 
have gone im written if Innocent III. and St. 
Francis of Assisi had not impregnated their 
generation with their ideas. 

In his essay on Carlyle, LoweU goes into German 
history in discussing Frederick the Great; he does 
not persuade one of the accuracy of his knowledge 
or of the justice of his opinions. His attitude 
toward Frederick may be gathered from one 
sentence which bears eloquent testimony that the 
critic's view of history was that of the mere man 
of letters : 



Frederick had certainly more of the temperament 
of genius than Marlborough or Wellington; but, not 
to go beyond modern instances, he does not impress 

^Sidney, 1 622-1 683; James Francis Edward Stuart, the Pre- 
tender, bom 1688. 2 Works, iv., 237. 



72 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

us with the massive breadth of Napoleon, or attract 
us with the climbing ardor of Turenne. ^ 

In the matter of science, Lowell was even farther 
afield. He writes in 1878 : ''Not that I like science 
any better than I ever did. I hate it as a savage 
does writing, because he fears it will hurt him 
somehow."^ Eight years later he wrote a paper 
called The Progress of the World, to introduce a 
work ''in which the advance in various depart- 
ments of intellectual and material activity was 
described and illustrated." Here if anywhere 
one would expect something approaching the 
scientific, something concrete and specific. Lowell 
recognized his limitations and felt amused at 
having been asked to contribute an introduction 
to such a work. Speaking of the earth he writes : 

Beginning as a nebulous nucleus of fiery gases, a 
luminous thistle-down blown about the barren wastes 
of space, then slowly shrinking, compacting, growing 
solid, and cooling at the rind, our planet was forced 
into a system with others like it, some smaller, some 

^ Works, ii., 114. Vide an article in Lippincotfs, vol. vii., 
probably by John Forster Kirke, who takes issue with Lowell on 
his views of Frederick, 

^Letters, ii., 230. Science to Lowell's mind seems the foe of 
religion: "I think the evolutionists will have to make a fetich 
of their protoplasm before long. Such a mush seems to me a 
poor substitute for the Rock of Ages." Letters, ii., 245. Cf. 
Credidimus Jovem Regnare and Turner's Old Timer aire, Poetical 
Works, iv. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 73 

vastly greater, than itself, and, in its struggle with 
overmastering forces, having the moon wrenched 
from it to be its night-lamp and the timer of its tides." 

This is the expression of a man standing poles 
apart from science, from scientific knowledge, and 
the scientific point of view. ^ 

Although, as has been pointed out, Lowell knew 
his classics and was a believer in their cultural 
value, he was strangely imimpressed by the beauty 
of Greek art. While on an exciu-sion to Greece 
in the spring of 1878, he wrote that the town was 
''shabby" and "modem" and that he was "for 
turning about and going straight back again." 
Though he pays a visit to the Parthenon and to 
the Acropolis he is interested for the most part in 
noting that the Grecian coast is "even grimmer" 
than that of New England ; that it seemed odd for 
the newsboys to cry the newspapers in Greek; 
that the Thessalian insurgents "reminded him of 
Macaulay's Highlanders." He wrote home to 
Norton, "I prefer Gothic to Grecian architecture." 
He had already confessed in the Cathedral, 

The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness. 

His preference for Gothic over Greek art was 
nothing new or sudden, for back in 1854 ^^ wrote, 

^ It is interesting to note that Lowell attended lectures in 
Dresden on the natural sciences and even assisted at the ana- 
tomical classes. Vide Scudder, i., 382. 



74 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

''There is nothing in ancient art to match Shake- 
speare or a Gothic minster."^ 

Sculpture Lowell scared}'- mentions. In his 
essay on Dante, he says of Florence, *'For her the 
Pisani [wrought] who divined . . . the Greek 
supremacy in sculpture." With what seems like 
half-hearted interest he says, "In art . . . Rome 
is wondrously rich especially in sculpture. ' ' Paint- 
ing interests him more, =" though his taste and opin- 
ions are often surprising. He wonders if Michael 
Angelo has not ** cocked his hat a little wee bit 
too much " ; "Claude is great, but he had no imagi- 
nation"; "to me he (Titian) is the greatest of the 
painters." His fondness for Titian leads him into 
amusing superlatives; "I think . . . [Titian's 
Assumption] the most splendid piece of color in 
the world"; "Titian's Tribute Money is marvel- 
ously great"; "I made up my mind that I would 
rather have it (a portrait by Titian) than any 
other picture in the world — ^yes, rather than my 
favorite Presentation of the Virgin in Venice."^ 
Seeing Albert Durer's portrait of the Emperor 

^ Works, i., 212. In Works, iv., 233, he says: " The Greek temple 
. . . leaves nothing to hope for in unity and perfection of design, 
in harmony and subordination of parts, and in entireness of 
impression. But in this aesthetic completeness it ends. It rests 
solidly and complacently on the earth and the mind rests there 
with it." 

"In 1852, after returning from Italy, Lowell writes, "I have 
studied Art to some purpose." Letters, i., 195. 

3 Letters t i., 234. 



RANGE OF LOWELL'S KNOWLEDGE 75 

Maximilian at three, he is interested because the 
child has "an apple in his hand instead of the globe 
of empire." At the Louvre, his attention is 
caught by a portrait of Lady Venetia Digby by 
Van Dyke, because it is ''the likeness of a woman 
who had inspired so noble and enduring a love in 
so remarkable a man as Sir Kenelm."' Lowell 
was obviously alive to the plastic arts merely as 
a man of letters; he travelled, observed, and 
read, but failed to regard other arts than liter- 
ature from the point of view which belonged to 
them. 

In trying to penetrate Turner and Frederick 
the Great, he looked at them from the same point 
of view as that from which he regarded Shakespeare 
and demanded of the painter and the soldier the 
possession of such imaginative powers as he dis- 
covered in the poet. His superlative admiration 
for Titian with his wonderful command of color, 
his depreciation of Greek architecture with its 
perfection of form, betray weaknesses in himself. 
His critical essays are not perfect units like the 
Greek temple; and though they possess the super- 
abundant ornament of the Gothic Cathedral they 
lack its fundamental unity of design. Lowell 
executes his gargoyles and flying buttresses, but 
forgets the unified body to which these are merely 
ornaments or supports. The glowing colors of 
Titian which captivate his fancies recall those 

^ Letters, i.,h235. 



76 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

purple patches of his own which sometimes dazzle 
us and make us forgetful of defects. 

These deficiencies of Lowell were unfortunate. 
A knowledge of art and science and history would 
have served to crystallize many of his vague 
notions ; to send the current of his literary knowl- 
edge into parallel channels with other phases of 
men's interests and endeavors, and so made that 
current deeper and broader and clearer. 



CHAPTER III 

Lowell's sympathy: its breadth and 
limitations 

LOWELL'S chief interest, as has been pointed 
out, centred in the classics of language — 
in those works which the consensus of opinion had 
passed upon as having been tried and not found 
wanting. It almost never came into Lowell's 
mind — one must remember that he was a conser- 
vative — to challenge their possession of the prime 
qualities. It was enough for him that they had 
survived by possessing elements of lastingness 
which all men conceded to them. His keenest 
interest concerned the greater rather than the 
lesser classics, Dante rather than Petrarch or 
Boccaccio, Shakespeare rather than Pope. It is 
true that Homer appears in his works far less than 
the Greek dramatists. But Homer offered no 
opportunity for direct comparison with any poet 
whom Lowell treated except Milton. Such a 
comparison would necessarily be limited and 
would make prominent the virtues of Homer 
rather than those of Milton. The Greek drama- 

77 



78 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

tists Lowell could set over against Shakespeare, 
emphasizing the differences and suggesting con- 
clusions in favor of the English poet. The critic's 
attitude of appreciation of the beauties of Greek 
literature cannot be doubted, but nothing in 
Greek appealed to him with the force of Shake- 
speare or Dante or Chaucer or Cervantes or 
Calderon. His interest in these latter poets was 
nothing short of enthusiastic devotion. Latin 
literature he regarded from the popular point of 
view, that is, as largely derivative; ''always a 
half-hardy exotic," he calls it. Though he con- 
cedes medieval influence to Ovid, originality to 
Horace, a profound imagination to Lucretius, 
and supreme elegance to Virgil, his attitude toward 
Latin literature is summed up in his declaration 
that it maintained an ''ordinary level of tasteful 
common-sense. ' ' ^ 

In the field of those literatures which were 
written in living languages and those languages 
the media of expression for some of the greatest of 
world poets, Lowell's interest becomes deep. To 
him Dante is "the founder of modem literature." 
The great Italian appealed to him powerfully just 
as he did to Lowell's friends, Longfellow and 
Norton. The Dante was written only after twenty 
years of study. In seriousness, comprehensive- 
ness, and devotion to minute detail it is Lowell's 
most important work in criticism. It would 

' Works t iii., 306. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 79 

seem as if Dante absorbed his intellectual energies 
to so supreme a degree that he had little left to 
bestow on the other important figures of Italian 
literattire. In the critic's mind Dante probably- 
made Petrarch and Boccaccio, Ariosto and Tasso, 
appear dwarfed in comparison. In his single 
excursion into the field of French liter attue, Lowell 
concerned himself with Rousseau. He thought 
of the works of Comeille and of Racine as "sham- 
classic pastures . . . where a colonnade supplies 
the dearth of herbage." ' To Lessing alone among 
the Germans he devoted an essay. Whether the 
critic's avoidance of Goethe were deliberate or 
not, one cannot asstmie to say. But his election 
of the secondary author was not tmfortunate. 
Goethe, imlike Lessing, did not present to the 
critic a comparatively simple study, but one of 
many complexities. How adequate might have 
been Lowell's treatment of Goethe may be later 
apparent when the question of his methods of 
handling such complex problems has been dis- 
cussed. 

Although to LoweU, Shakespeare was emphati- 
cally the dominant figure in English literature^ 
he did not on that account exclude the lesser 
poets from studious consideration. English was, 
after aU, the language of Lowell's most intimate 
knowledge, a heritage, not an acquirement, and 
in devoting study to the great figures of its litera- 

* Letter Sf ii., 46. 



80 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

ture, he found place for such secondary writers 
as Pope and Dry den. 

In giving attention chiefly to English writers, 
Lowell concentrated on the poets. He always 
held the poetic calling sacred. The poet's ought 
to be 

"the song, which, in its metre holy. 
Chimes with the music of the eternal stars, 
Humbling the tyrant, lifting up the lowly. 

And sending sun through the soul's prison-bars."* 

As his letters attest, it was with his own poetry 
rather than with his prose that Lowell was most 
concerned. A poet himself, it was but natural 
that he should study the greatest names of a 
brotherhood of which he could reckon himself a 
member. His studies of prose writers are less 
happy than those of poets, and his phrasing of 
dicta frequently persuades the reader that he is 
regarding the author discussed as poet rather 
than as prose writer. He says of Carlyle, to 
take but one example : 

With a conceptive imagination vigorous beyond 
any in his generation, with a mastery of language 
equalled only by the greatest poets, he wants alto- 
gether the plastic imagination, the shaping faculty, 
which would have made him a poet in the highest 
sense. ^ 

^Poetical Works, i., 34. Cf. Letters, i., 104; Works, iv., 357, 
262 ff. a Works, ii., 90. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 8i 

Dealing with Shakespeare and Dante and 
Chaucer, and even with Lessing and Rousseau 
and Dry den, Lowell was treating in every case a 
man whose position as a great fact in the history 
of his national literature stood beyond cavil. 
With such men in mind, Lowell cotild give his 
definition of a classic : 

A classic is properly a book which maintains itself 
by virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and 
style, that innate and exquisite sympathy between 
the thought that gives life and the form that consents 
to every mood of grace and dignity, which can be 
simple without being vulgar, elevated without being 
distant, and which is something neither ancient nor 
modern, always new and incapable of growing old. ^ 

What attitude will Lowell maintain towards 
these classics of language? To "measure an 
author fairly," he holds, one must take him on the 
strongest side, ''for the higher wisdom of criticism 
lies in the capacity to admire." ^ Reading Lowell's 
essays on the classics, one can doubt neither his 
capacity to admire nor his possession of that sym- 
pathy without which such capacity were impossi- 
ble. Of Dante the man he can say, "Dante is the 
highest spiritual nature that has expressed itself 
in rhythmical form."^ Reviewing the Italian 
poet's works, he can study all with keen interest 
and bestow on them the ample praise of a sym- 

* Works, iv., 266. 2 ihid.y iii., 140. * Ihid. iv., 263. 



82 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

pathetic mind. The Canzoni he finds admirable 
for "elegance, variety of rhythm, and fervor of 
sentiment"'; the Vita Nuova is incomparable "as 
a contribution to the physiology of genius"^; 
the Convito "is an epitome of the learning of that 
age, philosophical, theological, and scientific"^; 
De Vulgari Eloquio is incomplete but is of "great 
glossological value" and "conveys the opinions 
of Dante"; De Monarchia is valuable for helping 
us towards a "broader view of him as a poet," 
though compared with the political treatises of 
Aristotle and Spinoza, it shows the "limitations of 
the age in which he lived." ^ The Commedia 
"remains one of the three or four universal books 
that have ever been written." ^ 

For the age as well as for Dante and his works 
Lowell seems to have no difBculty in getting the 
point of view of appreciative understanding: "I 
am not ashamed to confess a singular sympathy 
with what are known as the Middle Ages. I 
cannot help thinking that few periods have left 
behind them such traces of inventiveness and 
power." ^ Lowell was keenly alive to the good 
as well as to the evil of the Middle Ages. Dante's 
was a "time of fierce passions and sudden trage- 
dies, of picturesque transitions and contrasts." 
In that era "a whole century seems like a mere 
wild chaos. Yet during a couple of such centuries 

^ Works, iv., 229. ^ Ibid., iv., 148. 3 Ibid., iv., 154. 

*Ibid., iv., 153 (note). s Ibid., iv., 165. ^ Ibid.^ i., 212. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 83 

the cathedrals of Florence, Pisa, and Sienna got 
built; Cimabue, Giotto, Amolfo, the Pisani, Briinel- 
leschi, and Ghiberti gave the impulse to modern 
art . . . ; modem literature took its rise ; commerce 
became a science, and the middle class came into 
being." ^ However general all this may be, it at least 
proves Lowell's sympathetic attitude towards me- 
dieval times. The man Dante as well as his age 
and his works meets with a like sympathy on 
Lowell's part: '*In all literary history there is no 
such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of 
life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime 
irrecognition of the imessential."^ 

With a sympathy broad enough to extend from 
Shakespeare to Dante and his age, it seems sur- 
prising that Lowell should say: "The whole of 
Eiu-ope during the fifteenth centiuy produced no 
book which has continued readable, or has become 
in any sense of the word, a classic."^ Not only 
in this century but in the sixteenth century as 
well, England was to Lowell a literary desert. 
Yet his sympathy was warm for those two great 
poets between whose lofty genius those two 
centuries stretched. Indeed Lowell's attitude of 
appreciative understanding, so marked in the 
case of Dante, could hardly fail when he came to 
consider the great figures of his own language. 
Chaucer's is a "pervading wholesomeness " ; a 
humor which "pervades his comic tales like stm- 

^ WorkSf iv., 126, 127. 2 Ibid., iv., 162. 3 Ibid., iv., 266. 



84 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

shine"; and a "gracious worldliness."^ Spenser's 
style is "costly"; on reading him one passes 
"through emotion into revery"; for "to read him 
is like dreaming awake," and he knew "how to 
color his dreams like life and make them move 
before you in music."* Shakespeare was great 
in imagination and fancy, in perspicacity and 
artistic discretion ; in judgment and poise of char- 
acter he was "the greatest of poets." ^ Milton, who 
like Dante "believed himself divinely inspired," 
reflects in his matiurer poems "a sublime inde- 
pendence of human sympathy," a phase of 
strength which Lowell could admire the more 
because conscious of its lack in himself. Behind 
the critic's sympathetic understanding of these 
poets was not only that conservatism on his part 
which tended to make him take the classics for 
granted, but a perception of qualities on their 
part which appealed to him strongly. Such were 
"gracious worldliness " ; a style which wafted one 
"through emotion into revery"; powerful imagi- 
nation not divorced from "poise of character"; 
such lofty ethical purpose and idealization of the 
poetic calling as characterized Dante and Milton. 
Towards the secondary English poets, Lowell 
does not fail in appreciation. Although Dry den 
to his mind "wanted that inspiration which comes 
of belief in and devotion to something nobler and 

^ Works, iii., 291 ff. 

» Ibid.f iv., 334 flf. (passim). 3 Ibid., iii., 92. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 85 

more abiding than the present moment," a type 
of inspiration which the critic found in Dante and 
Spenser and Milton and which he could read 
readily into Chaucer and Shakespeare, still Lowell 
concedes him ''the next best thing to that — a 
thorough faith in himself,"' While admitting 
the slight value and the great immorality of 
Dryden's comedies, Lowell suggests palliations: 
he was "imder contract to deliver three plays a 
year," and the age was dissolute. =^ Dryden's 
prose was admirable and possessed of suppleness 
and grace and familiar dignity. ^ The poet was 
"thoroughly manly," a fact which gives Lowell 
warrant for admiring him aside from his position 
as a classic. ''Amid the rickety sentiment loom- 
ing big through misty phrase which marks so 
much of modem literature, to read him is as 
bracing as a northwest wind."^ Lowell would 
not suggest that Dryden had a place in the first 
rank of English poets. "Certainly he was not, 
like Spenser, the poets' poet, but other men have 
also their rights." ^ This last clause suggests 
aptly Lowell's gift of sympathy. 

In Pope we find a frank avowal of Lowell's 
early attitude: "There was a time when I could 
not read Pope but disliked him on principle."^ 
One recalls his youthful declaration: "When you 



^ Works, iii., 103. 2 lUd., iii., 151. 3 Ihid., iii., 129. 

4 Ihid., iii., 189. s Ihid., iii., 189. ^ Ibid., iv., 26. 



86 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

call him poet, you insult the buried majesty of all 
earth's noblest and choicest spirits."' One has 
a feeling that this utterance, though expressed 
when Lowell was but twenty-five, discloses an 
opinion which he never entirely abandoned. By 
1855, there had crystallized to a considerable 
degree, that conservatism in Lowell which ex- 
pressed itself towards literature as an acceptance 
of great writers in the light of general opinion. 
The views he held in 1855 regarding Pope were 
essentially those of his essay in the North American 
Review for January, 1871. He would not have 
us believe him prejudiced against Pope; since the 
early days of his dislike he has read the poet 
** carefully more than once. ... If I have not 
come to the conclusion that he was the greatest 
of poets, I believe that I am at least in a condition 
to allow him every merit that is fairly his."^ He 
condemns the Dunciad and finds that the Essay 
on Man is ''shallow and contradictory." He 
praises the Essay on Criticism, declares that in his 
Moral Essays and parts of his Satires, ''Pope must 
be allowed to have established a style of his own, 
in which he is without a rival," ^ and grants that 
the Rape of the Lock is the "most perfect poem" 
of its kind "in the language." ^ But it must be 
confessed that one does not find in Lowell's essay 

^ Conversations y p. 5 ff. ^ Works, iv., 26. 

3 IHd., iv., 44. •♦ Ihid., iv., 56. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 87 

that ready sympathy for Pope which glows for 
the subjects of the studies which have just been 
considered. Pope in his eyes was the exemplar of 
an age which he calls "filthy" and ''an age of 
sham."^ 

While there is no evidence that Lowell felt a 
like antagonism towards the nineteenth century 
and its writers, his sympathy for them seems to 
have been imperfect. None of his longer or more 
carefully done critical essays concerned writers 
of his own century with the exception of Keats 
and Wordsworth. ^ The Keats is rather biographic- 
al than critical. The Wordsworth concerns a poet 
who had done his best work in the decade fol- 
lowing 1797 and whose qualities of genius had 
been pointed out in masterly chapters of the 
Biographia Liter aria. Lowell's other studies of 
nineteenth-century writers cannot be classed 
among his best critical work. They are fragmen- 
tary and inadequate. It would seem as if the 
literature of the century had no very genuine 
interest for him. This is all the more remarkable 
when one recalls his interest in poetry and brings 
to mind the brilliant array of poets extending 
from Wordsworth and Coleridge down. In his 
youth, Lowell foimd that some parts of Byron 
brought tears to his eyes. But by 1843 he could 

^ Works, iv., 48, 19. 

2 Keats was published as an introduction to an edition of his 
poems. Lowell first wrote on Wordsworth for a similar purpose. 



88 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

speak disparagingly of him in Conversations. 
Byron's feeling for nature marks him, says Lowell, 
as a child of Rousseau, who seems to have had a 
share in the English poet's tendency to sentimen- 
talism. Byron made ' ' motiveless despair ' ' fashion- 
able.^ It is conceded by the critic that he was 
one of the ''great names of the last generation," 
and that his "real strength lay in his sincerity." =* 
There can be little doubt however that Lowell's 
last utterance on Byron was indicative of his real 
feehngs: he confesses in 1889 to "an odd feeling 
of surprise that the framework of the fireworks 
. . . which so dazzled my youth should look so 
bare." 3 

It was as early as 1812 that Byron awoke to 
find himself famous; Shelley's reputation on the 
other hand gathered force with stu-prising slow- 
ness. To Lowell's mind Shelley is stilted. ^ He 
is a "mere poet," whose genius was a "St. Elmo's 
fire . . . playing in ineffectual flame about the 
points of his thought." s Though he has caught 
some of the pathos of the Elizabethans and has a 
fine feminine organization, he has a "fatal copi- 
ousness which is his vice."^ Lowell mentions 
Shelley in a letter written in 1877 ^o deny him a 
share in restoring to the ode its harmony and 
shapeliness. At best he seems to have felt only 

I Works, iv., 371. ^ Ihid., ii., 120; i., 100. 

3 Letters, ii., 386. •« Works, ii., 145. 

5 Ibid., ii., 229. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 89 

an imperfect interest in that elusive spirit whose 
gift made him one of the supreme lyrists in the 
language. ^ 

Of Clough, whom he came to know intimately, 
Lowell wrote: "He is a man of genius. . . . His 
Bothie is a rare and original poem."^ He thinks 
Clough ''imperfect ... in many respects," but 
believes that his poetry "will one of these days, 
perhaps, be found to have been the best utterance 
in verse of this generation." ^ To the mind of a 
day some forty years later than Lowell's expres- 
sion of opinion, several other Victorian poets seem 
to have a less imcertain claim on the attention of 
the next generation than Clough. 

Lowell's early opinion of Tennyson was highly 
complimentary. He wrote a review of the Prin- 
cess in 1848 in which he expressed his unqualified 
admiration. 4 The tone of the review may be 
gathered from the following sentences : 

We read the book through with a pleasure which 
heightened to unqualified delight, and ended in 
admiration. The poem is unique in conception and 
execution. It is one of those few instances in litera- 
ture where a book is so true to the idiosyncrasy of 
its author that we cannot conceive of the possibility 

^ Lowell wrote (1857) on Shelley as an introduction to an edi- 
tion of his poems. The essay is slight and biographical with no 
attempt at criticism. ^ Letters, i., 201 and 202. 

3 Works, ii., 121, and iii., 243. 

4 Massachusetts Quarterly Review for March, 1 848. 



90 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

of its being written by any other person, no matter 
how gifted.' 

In 1855 ^6 writes that Maud is ''wonderfully 
fine."^' But his early enthusiasm seems to cool 
as his conservatism hardens with the years. 
Though he finds that Tennyson has caught some 
of the simple pathos of the Elizabethans' music, 
and has been "the greatest artist in words . . . 
since Gray,"^ his "dainty trick . . . cloys when 
caught by a whole generation of versifiers as the 
style of a great poet never can be." ^ The knights 
of the Idylls are "cloudy, gigantic, of no age or 
country." s The Idylls themselves are imitative, 
not "reality . . . but a masquerade."^ These 
mature dicta are noticeably different in tone from 
the earlier judgments: it is not Lowell's enthusi- 
asm for literature which has cooled, but his 
sympathy for the literary output of his own day- 
As with Tennyson, so with Browning. In 1848 
Lowell, while finding Sordello "totally incompre- 
hensible as a connected whole," declared that the 
pieces in Bells and Pomegranates were "works of 

^"The design of the Princess,'" he says, "is novel. The 
movement of the poem is epic, yet it is redolent, not of Homer 
and Milton, but of the busy nineteenth century." These are 
curiously like his words on Clough's Bothie {Letters, i., 202). 
Cf. the above quoted judgment on the Princess with that on 
Shakespeare in Works, iii., 36. 

2 Letters, i., 235. 3 Ihid., ii., 86. 

4 Works, ii., 121. 5 Ihid., v., 242. Cf. Letters, ii., 85 ff. 

^Letters, ii., 85. Cf. Works, ii., 132. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 91 

art in the truest sense," that the author's dramatic 
power was "rare," and that he had "in him the 
elements of greatness."^ Lowell's subsequent 
indifference seems strange when we read: "To us 
he appears to have wider range and greater free- 
dom of movement than any other of the yoimger 
English poets." Later, in 1866, the critic de- 
clared that Browning, "by far the richest nature 
of his time, . . . becomes more difficult, draws 
nearer to the all-for-point fashion of the concettisti, 
with every poem he writes."^ In one of his 
English addresses, delivered in 1883, Lowell re- 
ferred to him as "a great living poet who has 
in his own work illustrated every form of imagina- 
tion." ^ Six years later in an American address 
his tone seems to be one of impatience. He quotes 
Browning as saying in the Preface to his transla- 
tion of the Agamemnon, "Learning Greek teaches 
Greek and nothing else." The critic comments: 
"One is sometimes tempted to think that it 
teaches some other language far harder than 
Greek when one tries to read his translation. "^ 

William Morris is unmentioned in Lowell's 
works, although he may lay claim to consideration 

^ Vide North American Review, April, 1848. 

2 Works, ii., 121. 3 Ihid., vi., 54. 

^Latest Literary Essays, p. 145. That Lowell's interest 
flagged in the maturer years following his warmly appreciative 
article in the North American Review gains color from the experi- 
ence of Mr. Moncure Conway who writes that Lowell (in 1858) 
"showed no interest in Browning." Vide Greenslet, p. 107. 



92 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

as a descendant by no means unworthy of the 
greatest of English narrative poets. Rossetti 
the critic praises for his translations from the 
early Italian poets. One suspects the source of 
Lowell's interest on reading: "Mr. Rossetti would 
do a real and lasting service to literature by em- 
ploying his singular gift in putting Dante's minor 
poems into English." ' True he mentions Rossetti 
in a letter written in 1858, but adds that he has 
"not yet made up his mind" about the poet. 
With Swinburne, to whose tragedies he devoted a 
paper in 1866, he was quite out of sympathy. 
Chastelard "is at best but the school exercise of a 
young poet learning to write. "^ Atalanta he 
concedes "is a true poem," but it is "a world of 
shadows," and betrays "a poverty of thought and 
confusion of imagery." All things considered, 
"it gives promise of rare achievement hereafter. "^ 
But an ohiter dictum which one finds in an article 
by Lowell somewhat more than a year later, lets 
us into the secret of his real attitude. Speaking 
of indifferent critics, he says: "Their . . . univer- 
sal solvent serves equally for the lead of Tupper 
or the brass of Swinbtune."^ It is worth noting 
that after five years spent in the great cosmopolis 

^ Works, iv., 229 (note). * Ihid., ii., 122. 

3 Works, ii., 123, 126. 

4 Vide North American Review for October, 1867, article 
"Winthrop Papers." Cf. Among My Books (i., 273) with Works* 
ii., 56. 



LOWELL^S SYMPATHY 93 

of London, Lowell in the revised edition of his 
works omitted that sentence. One may be per- 
mitted to suspect that tact rather than sympathy- 
suggested the omission. 

.On Matthew Arnold as a poet there is little in 
Lowell. While declaring that he sets ' ' a high value 
on Mr. Arnold and his poetic gift," he finds Merope 
''without color, without harmonious rhythm of 
movement, ' ' passionless and dull. ' It is a question 
whether Lowell would have said that *'a hundred 
years hence" Clough would be thought *'to have 
been the truest expression in verse of the moral 
and intellectual tendencies of his period," had 
Matthew Arnold instead of Clough been his intimate 
friend. "" 

As on Tennyson and on Browning, so also 
Lowell wrote on Landor and at about the same 
time. 3 Again he wrote on him many years later, 
after having met him personally, in order to intro- 
duce a sheaf of his letters published in the Century 
Magazine. With Lowell's admiration for Emer- 
son in mind, it is interesting to note the intro- 
ductory sentence of the later study: ''I was first 
directed to Landor's works by hearing how much 
store Emerson set by them."^ Lowell came to 
admire Landor for himself, though not without 

* Works, ii., 134. 

2 Vide Letters, ii., 17, for the probable answer to this question. 

3 Massachusetts Quarterly Review for December, 1848. 

4 Latest Literary Essays, p. 43. 



94 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

reservations. He says: "I can think of no author 
who has oftener brimmed my eyes with tears of 
admiration and sympathy." And yet the judg- 
ment of the earHer article — and Lowell had not 
forgotten it ^ — is by no means reversed in the later 
one: "We consider Landor as eminently a poet — 
though not in verse." 

The nineteenth century itself is ''a self -exploit- 
ing one"^ and the poetry of the modem style is 
"highfaluting . . . since poets have got hold of a 
theory that imagination is common-sense turned 
inside out."^ So constantly does this attitude 
crop out in his works that it cannot be considered 
the result of a moment's mood. He returns to 
the attack when he declares : 

A sceptic might say, I think, with some justice, that 
poetry in England was passing now, if it have not 
already passed, into one of those periods of mere art 
without any intense convictions to back it, which lead 
inevitably, and by no long gradation, to the mannered 
and artificial."* 

Lowell's appreciation, rising in some instances to 
enthusiasm, for most of the English poets of 

^Compare, for example: "We cannot so properly call Landor 
a great thinker, as a man who has great thoughts " (Mass. Q. R., 
ii., 65) with: "One would scruple to call him a great thinker, yet 
surely he was a man who had great thoughts" (Latest Literary 
Essays, p. 48). 

^ Works, iii., 94. Cf. Ibid., ii., 158; ii., 212; English Poets, 
p. 49, p. 66, p. 71. 3 Works, iii., 270. * Ibid., ii., 121. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 95 

whom he wrote, and his own poetical claims, make 
this lack of sympathy the more apparent. 

This imperfect sympathy was not limited to 
poetry; fiction and the drama have scant interest 
for him. To his mind the drama appears to have 
died with the last of the Elizabethans. In Dry den 
it is true he discusses the poet's plays, but he 
ignores Restoration drama as a whole. He tells 
us that Wycherly corresponded with Pope; that 
Congreve's " shamelessness is refreshing in that 
age of sham"; but there is no word about the 
Plain Dealer or the Way of the World. Lowell 
seems not to have suspected any connection be- 
tween the later Elizabethans and Restoration 
, comedy: Beaumont and Fletcher in his eyes left 
no heritage which found expression in the Maiden 
Queen or through Congreve, in Sheridan. In 
Shakespeare, he points out parallel passages in the 
English poet and the Greek dramatists, but there 
is no hint that Shakespearean influence survived 
in Venice Preserved or Jane Shore. So intently 
did he keep his eyes fixed upon the Tempest and 
Midsummer NigMs Dream that the School for 
Scandal and She Stoops to Conquer seem not to 
have come within his line of vision. When he 
discusses the difference in motive between the 
ancient and modem drama it is notable that by 
modem he means Shakespearean.^ His letters, 
so rich in references to poetic literature, are all 

« Works t iii., 57. 



96 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

but silent on the drama. If he ever attended the 
theatre when in Dresden or Paris or London one 
finds no mention of it, although he records going 
"down to Cambridge to see the Birds of Aris- 
tophanes."^ 

When we consider Lowell's attitude toward the 
novel we find in his work surprising silences. In 
Rousseau and the Sentimentalists occiu- references 
to Euripides and Ovid and Petrarch; but of 
Richardson (whose Pamela was translated into 
French in 1741) there is never a word. And yet: 
Richardson's 

influence was at once felt on the literature of the 
Continent; his novels as a whole or in part were 
translated into French, Italian, German, and Dutch. 
. . . The tremendous latent force which lay hidden 
in his emotionalism, when cut loose from moral and 
religious restraint, was made manifest in Rousseau.* 

This omission, by no means owing to a lack of 
knowledge on Lowell's part, seems ascribable in 
fairness to want of interest in that literary type 
in which Richardson was eminent. In his address 
on Fielding, Lowell speaks of Homer and ^schylus, 
of Dante and Shakespeare, but is silent about 
Fielding's work as a reaction from Richardson. 
He tells us that Fielding's genius was incapable 
of "ecstasy of conception"; that in "grossness his 

^ Letters, ii., 274. * Cross, The English Novell p. 41. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 97 

plays could not outdo those of Dry den" ; but there 
is nothing beyond a brief generality about his 
influence on the novel. Lowell had a personal 
acquaintance with Thackeray, at the time of the 
Fielding (1883) twenty years in his grave, but it 
seems not to have entered his mind to compare 
him with Fielding with whom he had so much in 
common. In an address on Books and Libraries 
(1885) he "can conceive no healthier reading for 
a boy or girl either, than Scott's novels, or Cooper's, 
to speak only of the dead." One remembers that 
the authors of Copperfield and of Henry Esmond 
had died several years before, and wonders why 
Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park should 
receive no mention. 

Lowell of course read Dickens and Thackeray. 
He is much pleased with Vanity Fair; Thackeray 
''has not Dickens' talents as a caricaturist but he 
draws with more truth."' 



In Dickens, the lower part of "the World" is 
brought into the Police Court, as it were, and there, 
after cross-examination, discharged or committed as 
the case may be. The characters are real and low, 
but they are facts. That is one way. Thackeray's 
is another and better. One of his books is like a 
Dionysius ear, through which you hear the World 
talking, entirely unconscious of being overheard.^ 

^ Scudder, i., 297. =* Letters, i., 211. 

7 



98 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

He is pleased to attend a reading by Dickens in 
1868, but in 1887 ''is trying to get rested by read- 
ing Dickens" whose David Copperfield he has 
never read. 

Of George Eliot we look for mention in vain. 
Jane Eyre was "very pleasant" to him and he 
"liked Wuthering Heights.'' Having nothing to 
do, he tries George Meredith, behind whose 
"briery intricacies" he gets occasional glimpses 
of a "consummate flower hidden somewhere."^ 
He reads "Harry James's and Howells's stories," 
and gives us the key to his interest in the novels 
of his protege Ho wells by writing him: "I am as 
weak as Falstaff and can't help liking whatever 
you do, whatever it may be." ^ Howells published 
an article in the North American Review on Re- 
cent Italian Comedy, Lowell writes him to 
send in "another on Modern Italian Literature or 
anything you like," his interest being "in your 
genius," it is evident, and not in modern Italian 
literature for its own sake. In Spain he is chiefly 
interested in old editions of Don Quixote and The 
Cid. 

Lowell's preference for Thackeray over Dick- 
ens may have been due to the latter's more 
obvious realism. He remarks that no one nowa- 

^ Letters t ii., 358. 

* Ibid., ii., 297. Of. ibid., ii., 17: "When my heart is warm 
towards anyone, I like all about him, and this is why I am so 
bad (or so good) a critic." 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 99 

days would have the courage to paint a man as 
Fielding dared to do.^ But it may be suspected 
that Lowell would not have read Tom Jones had 
it appeared a century after 1749. For we have 
Howells' word for it that Lowell "would not 
suffer realism in any but a friend." He could 
not be persuaded even to read the great Russian 
novelists. ''Ibsen," continues Howells, ''with 
all the Norwegians, he put far from him ; he would 
no more know them than the Russians ; the French 
natirralists he abhorred."^ For the same reason 
he ignored the claims of Valdes, of whom he says: 
He was "practically impervious to the germinal 
ideas which . . . give the writings of Balzac et 
Cie. a pressing claim upon the best attention of 
any serious modern critic. "^ He thinks Charles 
de Bernard "knew the Great World far better 
than Balzac knew it" and has been saved by a 
"gentlemanly humor" from "yielding ... to 
melodrama as Balzac so often did.""* Lowell's 



^ Works, vi., 63. 

* Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintance, p. 245. Cf. 
Works, vi., 85: "Among books . . . there is much variety of 
company, ranging from the best to the worst, from Plato to 
Zola." Cf. Works, vi., 60 for an attack on French reaUsts. 

3 Greenslet, p. 292. 

4 Letters, ii., 429. Vide Saintsbury, Essays on French Novelists, 
p. 165: "Charles de Bernard cannot be called a great novelist. 
... But for the actual amusement of the time occupied in 
reading him, and in the character of time-killer, he may challenge 
comparison with almost any artist in fiction." 



100 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

preference for the Odyssey over the Iliad, his fond- 
ness for Euripides and Calderon, point towards 
his romantic interests, interests which account to 
some extent for his lack of sympathy for reaHsm. 
"Fielding," he says, ''has the merit, whatever it 
may be, of inventing the realistic novel as it is 
called."^ In poetry he found that realism which 
belonged to the ''physically intense school," 
decidedly intolerable. Of this school "Mrs. 
Browning's Aurora Leigh is the worst example, 
whose muse is a fast young woman ... of the 
demi-monde.'''^ He places Swinburne in this 
school, "the worst school of modem poetry. "^ 
Realism become coarseness, offended him in 
Swift and Pope. He confesses to a hearty dislike 
of Dean Swift, regrets that his "smutchy verses 
are not even yet excluded from the collections," 
and accuses him of "filthy cynicism. "^ As for 
Pope, "No poet could write a Dunciad,'" he said 
in 1844, a declaration which he repeated twenty- 
seven years later. 

Pope he found guilty of insincerity — a weakness 
he could not brook. ' ' Without earnest conviction, ' ' 
he declared, "no great or sotind literature is con- 
ceivable." Waller, insincere and mean, supplied 
by his verses a constant target for Lowell, who 

^ Works, vi., 64. The italics are mine. 

^ Ihid., ii., 122. Cf. Letters, i., 365. 

3 Cf. Letters, i., 377, and Works, ii., 122. 

^Letters,!., 76; Conversations, p. 7; Works, iii., 153, and iv., 18. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY loi 

conceded to him only two good lines in all his 
poetry.^ Strong as was Lowell's antipathy to 
insincerity it was even stronger towards sentimen- 
tality. **I do abhor sentimentality from the 
bottom of my soul."^ Perhaps the consciousness 
of a tendency to this weakness in himself, kept 
in check however by a sense of humor, made Lowell 
especially hard on the sentimentalists. Petrarch 
he regarded as ''the first choragus of that senti- 
mental dance which so long led young folks away 
from the realities of life . . . and whose succession 
ended, let us hope, with Chateaubriand." ^ Pe- 
trarch was an "intellectual voluptuary " ; Chateau- 
briand was "the arch sentimentalist of these latter 
days," and with Lamartine is called "the mere 
lackey of fine phrases." ^ Rousseau "the modem 
founder of the sect" is a "quack of genius." ^ 
Moore, accused of living "in sham" and of "cloy- 
ing sentimentalism," was the object of the critic's 
hearty dislike.^ Percival, whom Lowell crushed 
in a paper which has been likened to Macaulay's 
Montgomery y was a sentimentalist, a fact which with 
Lowell puts his poetical mediocrity beyond all 
toleration. In this same essay the critic takes 

^ Among My Books (i.), p. 51. A slightly larger claim is 
allowed in Works, iii., 156. * Letters, i., 205. 

5 Works, i., 100; Cf. ibid., ii., 253. 
< Ihid., ii., 253; 160; 271. 
s Ihid., i., 376; Latest Literary Essays, p. 165. 
^ Ibid.y ii., 240, 145. Cf. ihid., iv., 391 (note). 



I02 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

occasion to express an opinion which shows a 
wholesome view of genius : 

The theory that the poet is a being above the world 
and apart from it is true of him as an observer only 
who applies to the phenomena about him the test of a 
finer and more spiritual sense. That he is a creature 
divinely set apart from his fellow men by a mental 
organization that makes them mutually unintelligible 
to each other, is in flat contradiction with the lives 
of those poets universally acknowledged as greatest.^ 

His paper on Thoreau proves him quite out of 
sympathy with the author of Walden, under whose 
"surly and stoic garb," he now and then detects 
*' something of the sophist and sentimentalizer." 
Why a man should be eager for the wilderness 
except "for a mood or a vacation," he cannot 
understand. He continues : 

Those who have most loudly advertised their passion 
for seclusion and their intimacy with nature, from 
Petrarch down, have been mostly sentimentalists, 
unreal men, misanthropes on the spindle side, solacing 
an uneasy suspicion of themselves by professing 
contempt for their kind. ^ 

It was the discovery of what he considered senti- 
mentalism which brought about a change in 
Lowell's opinion of the Elizabethan dramatist 

I Works, ii., 156. Cf. Letters, i., 366. 
» Works, i,, 376. Cf. ibid., iv., 412. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 103 

Ford. So strong was his aversion to this weak- 
ness, that in two notable instances his accusation 
of something close to sentimentality has the air 
of being introduced as a final justification of his 
unsympathetic attitude. He attacks Burke for 
attacking Rousseau and declares: ** Burke was 
himself also, in the subtler sense of the word, a 
sentimentalist."^ As to Carlyle he speaks of 
"his innate love of the picturesque (which is 
only another form of the sentimentalism he so 
scoffs at, perhaps as feeling it a weakness in him- 
self)."^ Realizing probably that this insinuation 
was scarcely warranted by the premise, Lowell 
added a footnote in 1888: "Thirty years ago, 
when this was written, I ventured only a hint 
that Carlyle was essentially a sentimentalist. 
In what has been published since his death I find 
proof of what I had divined rather than definitely 
formulated. "3 

Although Lowell employed a medieval setting 
in Sir Launfal and A Legend of Brittany, and 
although he used a familiar Greek theme in En- 
dymion, he inveighs against this search for subjects 
in the medieval or classical ages. He says frankly : 
"I don't believe in these modem antiques — ^no, 
not in Landor, not in Swinburne, not in any of 

I Works, ii., 233. ' Ibid., ii., 92. 

3 Cf. Letters, ii., 282, and Letters, ii., 320; "[Carlyle's] is a fine 
character to my thinking, especially manly and helpful to the 
core." 



104 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

'em. They are all wrong."' He complains that 
''Longfellow is driven to take refuge among the 
red men, and Tennyson in the Cambro-Breton 
cyclus of Arthur." ^ He reads the Idylls, but while 
he sees 

very fine childish things in Tennyson's poem and fine 
manly things, too, ... I conceive the theory to be 
wrong. I have the same feeling (I am not wholly 
sure of its justice) that I have when I see these modern- 
mediaeval pictures. I am defrauded; I do not see 
reality, but a masquerade. ^ 

One finds Lowell's theory difficult on remembering 
how much that was eminent in nineteenth-century 
poetry, from Laodamia and Isabella and The Cenci 
down, is drawn from fountain-heads either medi- 
eval or classic. 

Lowell never pardoned didlness in a work of 
literature; that was the irrevocable condemnation. 
To be interesting, he maintained, was "the first 
duty of every artistic production." ^ He finds 
Wordsworth dull at times, though he offers 
"extenuating circumstances." But when dealing 
with early poets in whom present-day interest is 
not keen, he could indulge his impatience of dull- 
ness without stint. ''We have Gascoigne, Surrey, 
Wyatt, stiff, pedantic, artificial, systematic as a 

^ Letters, i., 357. ^ Works, ii., 132. 

3 Letters, ii., 85. cf. infra, p. 170 and note. 

4 Works^ ii., 142. 



LOWELL'S SYMPATHY 105 

country cemetery . . . Stemhold and Hopkins 
are inspired men in comparison with them. "^ 
But of the author of Confessio Amantis, he has 
harder things to say: "Gower has positively 
raised tediousness to the precision of a science . . . 
You slip to and fro on the frozen levels of his 
verse which give no foothold to the mind . . . 
There is nothing beyond his powers to disen- 
chant."'' This attitude is not unintelligible. 
But it is not so easy to understand how on grounds 
of dullness he could condemn Peele and Greene. 
He thanks Greene "for the word 'brightsome' 
and for two lines" of a song. "Otherwise he is 
naught."^ Peele, he says, like Greene, "defied 
the inspiring influence of the air he breathed . . . 
But he had not that genius for being dull all the 
time that Greene had. ""* One cannot hesitate 
to believe that against dullness the stars in their 
courses fight in vain. Recalling, however, Old 
Wives' Tale and especially James IV., one hesitates 
to accept the critic's condemnation on the score of 
dullness. A more plausible reason for his quarrel 
with Greene and Peele may later be apparent. 

^ Works, iv., 274. » Ibid., iii., 329 and 330. 

3 Old English Dramatists, p. 19. ^ Ibid., p. 20. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE JUDICIAL ATTITUDE WITH LOWELL 

LOWELL'S sympathy with nineteenth-century 
literature, at least in some of its phases, 
would probably have been less imperfect but for 
qualities in himself which may be called provincial- 
ism and Puritanism. Living in a cosmopolis, he 
would have touched elbows with men who were in 
the full ciurent of their day in poetry, in drama, 
in the novel. Belles-lettres and the literature of an 
earlier time engaged his attention too absorbingly, 
and that myriad-mindedness which he could have 
found and to some degree did find late in life in 
London, was not discoverable in Cambridge or 
even in Boston.^ Lowell himself was awake to 
the difference. He writes to Norton in 1883: 

I like London, and have learned to see as I never 
saw before the advantage of a great capital. It 
establishes one set of weights and measures, moral 
and intellectual, for the whole country. It is, I 

^ Cf . To 0. W. H. in Poetical Works, iv., 120, where Lowell says 
they have always found Cambridge good enough for them. 

106 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 107 

think, a great drawback for us that we have as many 
as we have States.^ 

Lowell has caught in his English addresses some- 
thing of the cosmopolitan tone whose presence 
he had so quickly perceived. One cannot but 
notice, however, that the moderation of tone sits 
a bit awkwardly on his sentences : 

But what I think constitutes his (Coleridge's) 
great power ... is the perpetual presence of 
imagination ... It was she who gave him that 
power of sympathy which made his Wallenstein 
what I may call the most original translation in 
our language, unless some of the late Mr. Fitzgerald^ s 
he reckoned such.^ 

This effort to avoid superlatives, to express 
opinions more as opinions and less as facts beyond 
cavil, is conscious. But it never became deep- 
rooted and Lowell, home again in Massachusetts 
where he was free from the challenging eyes of a 
British audience, slipped back into broad super- 
lative: "It is no sentimental argument for this 
study [Greek], that the most justly balanced, the 
most serene, and the most fecimdating minds since 
the revival of learning have been steeped in and 
saturated with Greek literatiu-e. " ^ Again : Sterne 

^ Letters, ii., 273. 

» Works, vi., 72. The italics are mine. This address was 
delivered in Westminster Abbey, May 7, 1885. Vide infra, p. 
186. a Ibid., vi., 166. 



io8 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

is "the most subtle humorist since Shakespeare, " ' 
and Milton " is the most eloquent of Englishmen." ^^ 

But if Lowell's English experience did not leave 
him permanently wary of the allurements of super- 
lative, it doubtless conspired, with the staidness 
which came with years, to keep him from more 
obvious sins of provincialism. He is thereafter 
fairly on his guard against those hourgeoiseries 
which jar one frequently in his work.^ In his 
English addresses he slips only twice, once in an 
address not published till after his death, ^ once 
when speaking at the Workingmen's College, 
London, s 

Such hourgeoiseries are common enough in 
Lowell but by no means more common than 
ebullitions of a humor which is delightful at times 
but which often becomes sophomoric. Writing 
at the centre, Lowell would not have said: "It 
almost takes one's breath away to think that 
Hamlet and the Novum Organon were at the risk of 
teething and measles at the same time."^ Nor 
would he have let his provincialism carry him into 
sins against that taste which recognizes an instinc- 

^ Latest Literary Essays, p. 12. ' Ibid., p. 107. 

3 In Dante (1872) Lowell is careful to avoid these lapses. But 
in Spenser (1875) he returns to them again, though by no means 
with his old-time frequency. 

4 On Richard III., delivered before the Edinburgh Philosophi- 
cal Institution, published in Latest Literary Essays. 

5 Works, vi., 131. 

^ Works, iii., 16. Cf. also ibid.^ i., 271 ; ibid., iv., 38. 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 109 

tive propriety not only of subject but of treatment. 
Writing at the centre, he would hardly have said : 
"During his (Petrarch's) retreat at Vaucluse, in 
the very height of that divine sonneteering love 
of Laura, of that sensitive purity which called 
Avignon Babylon ... he was himself begetting 
that kind of children which we spell with a 6."' 
This particular weakness of Lowell's led him astray 
more than once. The finer propriety which he 
would have acquired if writing at the centre 
would have kept him from more notable faults 
against taste. He would not have devoted twenty- 
one out of fifty-nine pages to an attack upon the 
weak points of an editor so vulnerable as Mr. 
Masson. He would have found a different text 
for a preachment on modem-day sentimentalism 
than the disappointed life and mediocre verse of 
a man already eleven years in his grave. ^ He 
would not have so completely lost his temper as 
he did in Library of Old Authors. "The old 
maidenly genius of antiquarianism seems to have 
presided over the editing of the Library," he 
exclaims. Towards the chief editor of the Library, 
he betrays a special animus: "It might ... be 

' Works, ii., 255. Cf. also ihid., iii., 284; Latest Literary 
Essays, p. 9, etc. The classic case of Lowell's weakness for 
punning and bad taste occurs in Fireside Travels, p. 189, regarding 
the cataract and Milton. It is omitted from the final edition of 
Lowell's works. 

2 Percival died in 1856; his poems were published in 1859; 
Lowell's article appeared in 1867 in North American Review. 



no LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

as easy to perform the miracle on the blind man 
as on Mr. Hazlitt."' One recalls the slashing 
style of the old reviewers, happily extinct with an 
earlier generation, in place of which came such a 
method as that of Arnold in Lowell's own day, 
which lost none of its force by preserving all of its 
tirbanity. But Arnold was not provincial. 

Provincialism, it is safe to say, tended to strength- 
en Lowell's Puritanism, which was too deeply 
grounded to be affected by his years in Madrid and 
London. All his life he clung to two ideas; they 
were, as will be evident, not always maintained in 
his criticism and were at times even contradicted. 
But that they were deeply ingrained in his mind 
and were never really abandoned is beyond all 
question. They intruded upon his literary esti- 
mates in a confusing way and placed him in the 
quandary of being forced either to abandon or 
essentially to modify his belief on the one hand 
or to shut his eyes to genuine worth on the other. 
The first of these ideas concerns poetry; the sec- 



^ It has been said in Lowell's defense (Greenslet, p. i66) that 
his resentment towards England's pro-Southern attitude in the 
Civil War was partly the cause of the "peculiar animus" so 
evident in this essay. "The component single reviews of which 
this article is made up had appeared," says Mr. Greenslet, "in 
the Atlantic and North American in war-time. " This is not quite 
accurate. The first review appeared in the Atlantic in April, 
the second in May, the third in June, all in 1858; the fifth in 
the North American for July, 1864; the sixth in the same review 
for April, 1870; the fourth I have not been able to trace. 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE iii 

ond, character. As early as the Boston Mis- 
cellany days, Lowell believed in the sacredness of 
poetry and of the poetic calling. In Conversations 
he wrote: ''Poetry is something to make us wiser 
and better, by continually revealing those types 
of beauty and truth which God has set in all men's 
souls." Eleven years later he held to the same 
conception in his lectiu-es before the Lowell Insti- 
tute. The poet has a mission, to which he may be 
false, or of which he may be unconscious. ''The 
sacred duty and noble office of the poet is to reveal 
and justify . . . [grace and goodness, the fair, the 
noble, and the true] to men. " ' He does not leave 
beauty out of the reckoning: "No verse, the chief 
end of which is not the representation of the beauti- 
ful, and whose moral is not included in that, can 
be called poetry in the true sense of the word."^ 
He reaffirms this notion twenty years later in 
Spenser J though in Wordsworth he has declared 
that the poet will win our maturer gratitude who 
makes us less concerned with poetry as beauty 
than with poetry as a criticism of life.^ From 
these opinions of Lowell his conception of poetry is 
manifest: Poetry is the expression of beauty, but 
that beauty must be the medium for such ideas as 
make truth and nobility dearer to men. It is the 
presence of the moral element in the definition 
which leads to the consideration of the poet as a 

^ Lectures on the English Poets, p. 209. 

2 Ihid., p. 28. 3 Lowell's Works ^ iv., 413. 



112 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

man. Something of a religious character, says 
Lowell, clings to the poet. ''It is something to be 
thought of, that all the great poets have been good 
men." ^ The implication is inevitable and was for- 
mulated by Strabo in ancient days and by men as 
unlike as Shelley and Newman in our own time : no 
man can be a great poet who is not first a good 
man. Should Lowell cleave to such a definition of 
poetry, with its emphasis on the moral element, and 
demand goodness on the part of the poet, he is cer- 
tain to meet with difficulties. Men like Goethe, 
Byron, Shelley, and Burns will cause him more or 
less trouble. ^ In the case of most of the poets of 
whom he treated, a reconciliation of poetic gifts 
and character was not difficult; in no case was it 
impossible. 

Accepting the great classics without question as 
Lowell the conservative did, he was bound to 
reconcile his theory of the poet with the poet's 
work: if the work was noble so too must be the 
poet. He does not disguise his eagerness to bring 
them into harmony. His attitude towards a 
supposed phase of Chaucer's life, long current and 
by no means savory, is typical : 

^ English Poets, p. 203. Cf. Works, iv., 357, 48, 297. 

^ In the introduction which he wrote to Shelley's poems (1857) 
Lowell says, speaking of Shelley's treatment of his first wife: 
"A matter of morals, as between man and society, cannot be 
reduced to any individual standard however exalted." As to 
Byron, cf. Lowell's Works, ii., 238; as to Goethe, vide ibid., 
ii., 194- 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 113 

Our chief debt to Sir Harris Nicholas is for having 
disproved the story that Chaucer, imprisoned for 
complicity in the insurrection of John of Northamp- 
ton, had set himself free by betraying his accom- 
plices. That a poet, one of whose leading qualities 
is his good sense and moderation, and who should 
seem to have practiced his own rule, to 

*'Fly from the press and dwell with soothf astness ; 
Suffice thee thy good though it be small," 

should have been concerned in any such political 
excesses, was improbable enough; but that he should 
add to this the baseness of broken faith was incredible. ^ 

When he comes to speak of Dante, Lowell con- 
fronts a phase of the poet's life the truth of which 
has met wide acceptance. Taking up the charge 
that, following Beatrice's death, Dante gave him- 
self up to sensual gratification, Lowell says : " Let 
us dismiss at once and forever all the idle tales of 
Dante's amours."^ Boccaccio, he declares, "first 
set this nonsense agoing" and made such an 
accusation because "it gave him a chance to turn 
a period."^ There are dangers in arguing back 
from an assumed conclusion. 

^ Works, in., 295. ^ Ibid., iv. , 190. 

3 Ibid., iv., 190 and 191 (notes). "Nobody who never had 
felt the like himself could have painted the sinful love of Francesca 
and Paolo so touchingly ... as Dante has done in the fifth 
canto of Hell." Federn, p. 221. After Beatrice's death, "we 
know that Dante for a time led a rather dissolute life." Ibid., 

p. 235. 
8 



114 LOWELL AvS A CRITIC 

"a' This eagerness to bring a poet's character into 
accord with the critic's ideal of what it should be 
sometimes forces Lowell into open contradiction 
with his own opinion. Dry den, who is a favorite 
of his, was guilty of writing indecent comedies. 
But, says Lowell, "I do not believe that he was 
conscious of any harm in them till he was attacked 
by CoUier. "' A little later however, in the same 
essay, the licentiousness of Dryden's comedies is 
brought home to his recollection by the fact that 
^'Limerham was barely tolerated for three nights." 
He then declares: "Dryden's own apology only 
makes matters worse for him by showing that he 
committed his offenses with his eyes wide open. "^ 
Regarding the character of Shakespeare, Lowell 
expresses an opinion in accord with his ideal of 
the poet, though his conception finds neither 
confirmation nor denial in the facts as we know 
them. ''Higher even than the genius I rate the 
character of this unique man and the grand 
impersonality of what he wrote. "^ The second 
clause is rather vague; Lowell explains: Shake- 
speare has the poise and self-command, the serenity 
and loftiness which are so rare ''in our self -exploit- 
ing nineteenth century. " 

Lowell's conception of the importance of char- 
acter in its connection with poetic genius ap- 
proaches nearly to puritanism in his inclination 
to believe that great character is a noble form of 

^ Works, iii., 149. ' Ibid., iii., 152. 3 Ibid., iii., 94. 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 115 

genius. He goes even further: character, he asserts, 
is ''the only soil in which real mental power can 
root itself and find sustenance."' Difficulties 
lie ahead if Lowell cleave to this belief. He 
recognizes the difficulty himself: it will not be sur- 
prising to find him endeavoring to soften down the 
acerbity of Pope, and in the face of contradictions 
attributing sincerity to the lachrymose feverish- 
ness of Rousseau, just in proportion as he is eager 
to accoimt for the position of the one and to justify 
the fame and influence of the other. 

In his study of the great poets, Lowell decided 
not only that "all the great poets have been good 
men," but that "they were men of their genera- 
tion who felt most deeply the meaning of the 
present."^ This last idea, to which he himself 
as a poet did not always cleave, explains his failure 
to sympathize with much that is beautiful and 
probably enduring in nineteenth-century poetry. 
For, as has been already pointed out, Lowell dis- 
believed in Greek and medieval themes, thus 
making an application, provincial in its narrow- 
ness, of a belief to which one might well hesitate 
to take exception. 

It is not easy to say where in this general atti- 
tude Puritanism ends and provincialism begins. 
It is not easy to say how far this attitude would 
have been modified, if Lowell had all his life been 
writing at the centre. Possibly there would have 

^ Works, ii., 195. 2 English Poets, 210. 



ii6 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

been no modification at all. It has already been 
pointed out that various lapses against good taste, 
some slight, some grave, would not be chargeable 
to LoweU had he always been a cosmopolitan. 
Under such a fortunate condition he would prob- 
ably have felt more interest in the novel and the 
drama and a less imperfect sympathy for nine- 
teenth-century poetry. But his dislike of realism 
in the novel and of classic and medieval elements 
in modem poetry, while it might have been sof- 
tened by cosmopolitan influences, was probably too 
deeply rooted in his puritanism to be wholly 
eradicated. In his English address on Fielding he 
is not unsympathetic, though Fielding is a realist 
and the inventor of the realistic novel. Lowell's 
prejudice in this instance is kept out of sight : after 
all he is discussing a man whose "works are become 
a substantial part of . . . English literature." 
And yet his sense of moral evaluation will not 
down: a third of the address is given up to a con- 
sideration and defense of the morality of Fielding 
and his works. The significance of this lies not so 
much in the fact that Lowell played the role of 
apologist as that he considers such a role as neces- 
sary. It is obvious that this bent of mind which 
has been called puritanism was too deeply embed- 
ded in Lowell's fibre ; it played a part even in those 
essays where we have not already marked its 
presence. 

However defective Lowell's sympathies were in 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 117 

certain directions, he honestly tried to maintain 
detachment — to preserve the judicial attitude — 
towards the subject of the essay and his works. 
As proof of this the essay on Rousseau is worth 
examination. In ohiter dicta the critic declares 
Rousseau a sentimentalist, "the victim of a fine 
phrase, " and — ^here is his real attitude in a word — 
"a quack of genius. " But when he comes to dis- 
cuss Rousseau formally, he is determined to main- 
tain a judicial attitude. His lack of sympathy 
must not appear: after all, the object of his con- 
sideration is a French classic, whose influence 
in awakening an appreciation of nature, and in the 
fields of political thought and of education, has 
been great. Lowell first considers Biu*ke, who 
bitterly attacked Rousseau; then Johnson, who 
** would sooner sign a sentence for his (Rousseau's) 
transportation, than that of any felon who has 
gone from the Old Bailey these many years"; and 
finally Tom Moore, who potired out ''several 
pages of octosyllabic disgust at the sensuality of 
the dead man of genius."' Lowell attempts to 
invalidate these attacks by attacking the men who 
made them. Biu-ke was vain, a sentimentalist, 
and a snob. ^ Johnson was a hard-headed, illogical 
conservative, and a friend of "that gay man about 
town, Topham Beauclerk" and of "that wretched- 
est of lewd fellows, Richard Savage. "^ Moore 

^ Works, ii., 235 ff. passim. ' Ihid., ii., 233, 236, 

3 Ibid., ii., 236. 



Ii8 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

was a sentimentalist, a toady, and a sham.' 
Rousseau, continues Lowell, had genius, and the 
attacks upon his character might well have been 
omitted : "Genius is not a question of character. " ^ 
Indeed, as to the man of genius, "Whatever he was 
or did, somehow or other God let him be worthy 
to write this, and that is enough for us. "^ But 
after aU, Lowell cannot quite forget that Rousseau 
is "a quack of genius" and a sentimentalist who 
sent his children to the foundling hospital. He 
cannot ignore his character. He retreats: "The 
moment he (the sentimentalist) undertakes to 
establish his feeling as a rule of conduct, we ask at 
once how far are his own life and deed in accord- 
ance with what he preaches."'' After all, how 
fine a thing is a lovely action I^ He soon rettirns 
to Moore and remembering that he has branded 
him as a sham and a toady for daring to call genius 
an impostor, declares: "The confusion of his 
(Moore's) ideas is pitiable. . . . [Genius] is always 
truer than the man himself is, greater than he. "^ 
He illustrates: "If Shakespeare the man had been 
as marvellous a teacher as the genius that wrote 
his plays . . . would his contemporaries have left 
us so wholly without record of him as they have 
done?"s One feels that Lowell's eagerness to do 
justice to Rousseau has led him far afield. He 
retreats again, not to any further abstract dis- 

» Works, ii., 238 ff. a Ihid., ii., 241. a Ihid., ii., 241. 

4 Ibid,t ii., 243. s Ihid.^ ii., 244. 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 119 

cussion, but to a consideration of Rousseau's 
character. Though weak and sometimes despi- 
cable, he **is not fairly to be reckoned among the 
herd of sentimentaHsts. "^ Moreover, ''In judg- 
ing Rousseau it would be unfair not to take note 
of the malarious atmosphere in which he grew 
up. "^ In a consideration of sentimentalism and 
of prominent sentimentalists in literature, Lowell 
feels, it is easy to see, a revulsion from the unreality 
of their work. He forgets that "genius is not a 
question of character" ; now he says: Except in the 
case of the highest creative genius "the author is 
inevitably mixed with his work, and we have a 
feeling that the amount of his sterling character is 
the security for the notes he issues. " ^ This excep- 
tion marks a return towards Lowell's real belief in 
the inter-relation of genius and character. Again he 
comes to Rousseau : he was the ' ' most perfect type of 
the sentimentalist of genius . " "* In fact his was ' ' the 
brain most far reaching in speculation that ever kept 
itself steady . . . amid such disordered tumult of 
the nerves. ' ' ^ And yet one cannot read his Rousseau 
juge de Jean Jacques without believing him insane. ^ 
The contradiction here Lowell does not notice: 
his point in one sentence is to praise Rousseau for 
his mental power and in the next to suggest a reason 

^ Works, ii., 244. 

'Ibid., ii., 247. Vide Lippincott's, vii., 645 ff., on Lowell's 
misconception in this matter. 

3 Ibid., ii., 257. 4 Ibid., ii., 262. s Ibid., ii., 263. 



I20 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

for a "charitable . . . notion of him." Lowell 
continues: Rousseau had a remarkable vein of 
common sense, although his political system was 
based on a fallacy. "For good or evil, " Rousseau 
"was the foster-father of modern democracy."' 
As a man he "might have been a saint" or "have 
founded an order," although a little later Lowell 
from his Confessions would "assign him to that 
class with whom the religious sentiment is strong 
and the moral nature weak."^ Let us pity, he 
pleads, not condemn. We ought not to ask, What 
kind of life did Rousseau lead, but rather, "Was 
this the life he meant to lead?"^ Lowell knows 
the answer he would make to all this. He made it 
nineteen years later when he called Rousseau "a 
quack of genius. ' ' But now Rousseau is the subject 
of his essay ; he is bound to treat him with judicial 
impartiality . He answers : 

Perhaps, when we take into account his faculty of 
self-deception ... we should ask, Was this the life he 
believed he led?^ Have we any right to judge this 
man after our blunt English fashion, and condemn 
him, as we are wont to do, on the finding of a jury of 
average householders ? Is French reality precisely our 
reality? Could we tolerate tragedy in rhymed alex- 
andrines, instead of blank verse ?^ 

I Works, ii., 264. ' Ihid., ii., 265. 3 Jhid., ii., 268. 

4 Cf. Introduction to Shelley's Poems, p. 21 : "A question of 
morals as between man and society cannot be reduced to any 
individual standard however exalted." 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 121 

Rousseau was a typical Frenchman, in many 
respects, and too often "fell in with the fashion" 
of "truth padded out to the size and shape de- 
manded by comme-il-faut.''^ Rousseau was 
"intellectually . . . true and fearless; consti- 
tutionally, timid, contradictory, and weak; but 
never, if I understand him rightly, false." ^ The 
final conclusion is really the keynote to Lowell's 
true position; stripped of metaphor it means: 
Rousseau belonged to the sentimentalists, but 
there were excellent elements in him notwith- 
standing and less taint than is usual with the class. ^ 
One cannot but feel that Lowell has tried hard to 
treat Rousseau with justice although his endeavors 
led him into strange vagaries. He attacks Burke 
and Johnson, both of whom he admires; hope- 
lessly upsets his deep-rooted notion of genius and 
character; involves himself in a contradiction 
regarding Rousseau's sanity; employs false logic; 
and sins against historical accuracy. The price 
was rather a heavy one to pay : it at least proves 
that Lowell was eager to be fair. 

In his essay on Pope, Lowell recalls his earlier 
dislike of the poet, and though his sympathy is 
imperfect he protests that he is "at least in a 
condition to allow him every merit that is fairly 
his." In 1886, Lowell expressed what a study of 
the Pope persuades one was his real opinion: 
Pope's "vivid genius almost persuaded wit to 

^ Works, ii., 269. 2 Ibid,, ii., 270. 3 Ibid., ii., 270 flF. 



122 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

renounce its proper nature and become poetry." 
This was also his opinion in Conversations. In 
the essay on Pope, he declares that the poet ''fills 
a very important place in the history of English 
poetry. " The final point of the essay is embodied 
in this question : Was Pope really a poet ? Lowell's 
own belief is evident. But he is talking of a classic 
of English literature and feels bound to do him 
justice : his judicial findings must not be radical on 
the one hand, nor unfair on the other. He avoids 
an unequivocal answer ; he implies that Pope is not 
a poet since "in any strict definition there can be 
only one kind of poetry."' But "it should seem 
that the abiding presence of fancy in his best 
work forbids his exclusion from the rank of poet. " ^ 
This idea grows on him until he assumes the very 
point under discussion in his declaration: "The 
Rape of the Lock sets him even as a poet far above 
many men more largely endowed with poetic 
feeling and insight than he. "^ All things con- 
sidered, one feels that Lowell has held in check his 
lack of sympathy and tried to maintain a judicial 
attitude. As for Pope as a man he says: "In 
spite of the savageness of his satires, his natural 
disposition seems to have been an amiable one . . . 
There was very little real malice in him"; and 
"'his evil was wrought from want of thought. '"^ 
Lowell believes him a poseur in his letters, thinks 

» Works, iv., 53. ^ Ihid., iv., 56. 

3 Ibid., iv., 57. * Ibid., iv., 49 ff. 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 123 

his attack on Theobald due to jealousy, and says 
he made a ''brutal assault" on Denis in order 
to "propitiate a man whose critical judgment he 
dreaded."' But the critic would be just and 
finds palliation in the influence of the age and of 
Swift. 

If it is necessary to examine Lowell's attempt 
to maintain a judicial attitude towards men like 
Rousseau and Pope, with both of whom he was out 
of sympathy, it is no less important to examine 
him from the same point of view in his essay on 
Carlyle, towards whom he felt "a secret par- 
tiality."^ 

If he tries to transcend his sympathy and become 
judicial and coldly considerate, he fails and be- 
comes "perhaps . . . harder on him than I 
meant. "^ Carlyle, he finds, is the "first in 
insight of English critics and the most vivid of 
English historians. " 3 He has a "conceptive 
imagination vigorous beyond any in his gener- 
ation," a "mastery of language equalled only by 
the greatest poets. "^ But he has many defects 
which we have a right to inquire into "when he 
asstimes to be a teacher of moral or political phi- 
losophy. "4 Carlyle would force his ideas upon us 
by repeating them "with increasing emphasis and 
heightened shrillness, " s tintil they have at last 
become cant,^ and he has grown to be insincere 

^ Works, iv., 52. 2 Letters, ii., 74. 3 Works, ii., 86. 

* Ibid.y ii., 90. s Ibid., ii., 96. ^ Ibid., ii., 97. 



124 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

and "something very like a sham himself."' 
Caryle's conception of history moreover is wrong : 
it is not primarily concerned with heroic or typical 
figures. =" The Frederick he finds is an exaltation of 
a man far below the heroic standard. ^ It is a work 
which (and this is significant) "is open to all 
manner of criticism, especially in point of moral 
piirpose and tendency. ""* Lowell approaches the 
end of the essay; perhaps he has gone too far in 
his adverse criticism. He says: "With all deduc- 
tions, he remains the profound est critic and the 
most dramatic imagination of modem times. "^ 
He belongs to the highest order of minds, for he is 
an inspirer and awakener.s The next sentence 
is noteworthy, for Lowell is thinking of his own 
obligations: "The debt due him from those who 
listened to the teachings of his prime for revealing 
to them what sublime reserves of power even the 
humblest may find in manliness, sincerity, and self- 
reliance, can be paid with nothing short of rever- 
ential gratitude. "5 There lies the secret of 
Lowell's partiality. Perhaps he has experienced 
a reaction from the admiration of the early days; 
his tone in the essay is of one who has outgrown his 
author. In considering Carlyle, it is to be remem- 

» Works., ii., 1 08. 

» Cf. Lowell's utterance in 1885 {Works, vi., 91): "History is, 
indeed, mainly the biography of a few imperial men. " 

3 Works, ii., no. 4 Ihid., ii., 117. 

i Ibid., ii., 118. 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 125 

bered, Lowell had not the steadying influence of 
that body of opinion which grows up through the 
years around a classic. These various reasons 
may be considered to have given Lowell through 
most of the essay an unsympathetic point of view. 
Beyond doubt his "secret partiality" explains the 
upsetting of his judicial attitude at the outset. 
In his eagerness to rise superior to that partiality, 
the critic assumed an attitude which carried him 
too far the other way. 

In Thoreau Lowell was treating not a classic 
author for whom he felt imperfect sympathy as 
in the case of Pope, nor one whose whole class he 
held in aversion as in the case of Rousseau, nor 
yet a contemporary like Carlyle for whom he 
had a secret partiaHty. In Thoreau rather he was 
discussing an author who, as a contemporary, had 
not the claim upon him which as a classic he would 
have exercised and who had never seemed to him 
more than a conscious and weak imitator of 
Emerson. '' He seems to me to have been a man 
with so high a conceit of himself that he accepted 
without questioning, and insisted on our accepting, 
his defects and weaknesses of character as virtues 
and powers pecuhar to himself."' His indolence, 
lack of persistency, poverty, selfishness — ^all made 
him regard their opposites as not worth possessing. ' 
Thoreau, he held, lacked continuity of mind, 
humor, and logical power. He was an egotist, 

* Works, i., 369. 



126 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

something of a sophist and sentimentalizer and 
lacked a "healthy mind."' "His aim was a 
noble and a useful one in the direction of 'plain 
living and high thinking,'" but his endeavors at 
carrying it out were unsound. "^ His thought and 
style furthermore were misty and not mystic. ^ 
Towards the end of the essay the pendulum swings 
back ; the critic seems warm for man and author 
as before he was warm against them. ' ' We have, 
he says, "the highest testimony to the natural 
sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his temper. " '^ 
He concedes that though narrow in range, Thoreau 
was yet a master. The critic seems to be trying 
honestly, however tardily, to give us the materials 
for striking a balance of justice. 

In treating the established classics of language 
Lowell points out those beauties of their work 
which all have united in praising. In the lesser 
classics he will find less to praise, and here and 
there something to blame. But the demands on 
his detachment, on his power to maintain a ju- 
dicial attitude, will be less than in the case of a man 
whose tribe is his aversion and much less than in 
the case of a contemporary for whom he feels such 
a partiality as in his conservative eyes would be 
quite safe only in the case of a classic. 

Shakespeare to Lowell is the greatest of poets. 
He is "extraordinary from whatever side we look 

^ Works, i., 373 ff. ' Ibid., i., 380. 

3 Ibid., i., 371. * Ibid., i., 378. 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 127 

at him. "^ Wherever one turns in Lowell's works 
one encounters the name of Shakespeare. The 
critic's attitude toward the greatest of the Eliza- 
bethans was evident as early as 1842 when he 
wrote: "Of the old dramatists . . . only Shake- 
speare united perfectness of parts with adaptation 
and harmony of the whole. "^ In Conversations 
Shakespeare appears frequently, his practice being 
taken as the ultimate criterion of perfection. As 
the years passed, Lowell's earlier judgment became 
even stronger in his mind, was elaborated and 
phrased in sweeping superlatives. No matter 
what writer is under discussion, Shakespeare is 
brought in for a triumphant comparison. Carlyle 
is great, we are told, in the delineation of character, 
but ''we doubt whether he could have conceived" 
a certain scene in Antony and Cleopatra^] Pope's 
Rape of the Lock shows fancy, but compare it 
with Midsummer Night's Dream and see how far 
it falls short of poetic fancy ^; Chaucer has a vivid 
imaginative faculty, but see how vastly superior 
is that of Shakespeare, s One wonders if Shake- 
speare is an obsession with Lowell. When he comes 
to devote an essay to the poet, one is prepared 
for the attitude he will assume. If Shakespeare 
abandons play writing and returns to Strat- 
ford, is it because he has made a comfortable 

^ Works, iii., 61. 

^Boston Miscellany, August, 1842, article "John Ford." 

3 Works, ii., 103. 4 Ihid., iv., 36. s Ihid., iii., 354. 



128 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

fortune and can satisfy his ambition to live in rural 
quiet with a patent of gentleman? No; it is 
because he has fathomed human life and "come 
at last to the belief that genius and its works were 
as phantasmagoric as the rest, and that fame was 
as idle as the rumor of the pit."' If parts of his 
text are obscure does it suggest inadequacy or 
carelessness on the part of the poet? No; it 

may be attributed either to an idiosyncratic use of 
words and condensation of phrase, to a depth of 
intuition for a proper coalescence with which ordinary 
language is inadequate, to a concentration of passion 
in a focus that consumes the lighter links which bind 
together the clauses of a sentence or of a process of 
reasoning in common parlance, or to a sense of music 
which mingles music and meaning without essentially 
confounding them. ' 

This is the attitude, not of judicial calm, but of 
special pleading. The following sentence illus- 
trates without need of further citation Lowell's 
assumption of perfection in Shakespeare : "Voltaire 
complains that he (Hamlet) goes mad without any 
sufficient object or result. Perfectly true, and 
precisely what was most natural for him to do, 
and, accordingly, precisely what Shakespeare 
meant that he should do." "^ Lowell's findings can 
be anticipated : in imagination, fancy, perspicacity, 
artistic discretion, judgment, poise of character, 
^ Works, iii., 27. ' Ibid., iii., 86. 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 129 

poetic instinct, hiimor and satire, he is so wonder- 
ful and unparalleled that even an atheist must 
believe his brain the creation of a Deity. ^ Lowell 
does not forget that the great poet must be a good 
man: high as he rates Shakespeare's genius he 
rates his character even higher. To all this there 
can be but one conclusion: here Lowell is not a 
judge; he is a panegyrist. 

Dante, for whom Lowell's admiration was 
second only to that for Shakespeare, receives 
almost the same treatment. The critic's attitude 
is not so frankly that of rapt devotion. Dante's 
work had faults: ''There are no doubt in the 
Divina Commedia (regarded merely as poetry) 
sandy spaces enough both of physics and meta- 
physics."^ That is the single adverse criticism 
in the essay and Lowell adds, "But with every 
deduction Dante remains the first of descriptive as 
well as moral poets. "^ For the rest, he is the 
supreme figure in Hterary history, whose readers 
turn students, his students zealots, and what was 
a taste becomes a religion.^ That sentence is 
significant : it is not the expression of a critic who 
will maintain the judicial attitude, but of one who is 
himself "a student turned zealot." In vividness, 
he regards Dante as without a rival; in straight- 
forward pathos, the single and sufficient thrust of 
praise, he has no competitor; he is "the highest 
spiritual nature that has expressed itself in rhyth- 

^ Works, iii., 92 ff. = /^.^ iy., 259. 3 Ihid., iv., 163. 

9 



130 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

mical form.*'' One does not necessarily take 
issue with these judgments. But they are arrived 
at either by ignoring or brushing aside the case of 
the advocatus diaholi and it is obvious from the out- 
set that the judge has determined on canonization. 
As a great poet, Dante must be a good man. The 
critic will have no flaw in him; charges of sensu- 
ality are to be "dismissed at once. " Does Dante 
pity Francesca? It is not out of friendship for 
her family or from consciousness of fleshly weakness 
in himself, but from the tenderness of his nature. ^ 
Does he betray vindictiveness? It is merely 
righteous anger against base men. ^ 

In Chaucer, as in Dante, Lowell's manner and 
attitude are much the same. There is no investi- 
gation of the poet's qualities; he is frankly a 
favorite with the critic, and the essay, so far as it 
deals with Chaucer, declares him, "One of the 
world's three or four great story tellers, . . . one 
of the best versifiers that ever made English trip 
and sing"; "one of the most purely original of 
poets."'* The few external stains on the man 
are nothing ; his character we may suppose genial, 
hearty, and good.^ 

As Lowell moves away from this triumvirate 
and comes to consider Spenser, Milton, and the 
rest, he succeeds in detaching himself to some 
extent from that superlative sympathy which in 

^ Works, iv., 263. » Ibid., iv., 171. 3 Ibid., iv., 177 fif. 

4 Ibid., iii., 336 and 360. s Ibid, iii., 365. 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 131 

the earlier cases became enthusiasm. His attitude 
toward Spenser is sympathetic enough but not 
lacking in judical coolness. Much in Spenser he 
says is evanescent, and the allegory of the Faery 
Queen is tiresome. The praise is not overdone, 
though it is generous as befits the ''poet's poet." 
That Milton was the doctrinaire who was ''more 
rhetorician than thinker " and who had a "haughty 
conception of himself, " Lowell admits, though the 
inadequate nature of the essay lets him do no 
more than suggest the poet's greatness. Towards 
the other classics that have not been already 
discussed, Lowell's attitude was for him judicial. 
Towards Wordsworth perhaps his sympathy may 
be open to question, although in his essay on 
the poet he does him justice. ' One might go on 
taking up in turn every essay which Lowell wrote. 
But the point of our examination can be made 
from those we have already discussed. 

Towards the subject of his essay the critic is 
most likely to transcend judicial calm. In Dante 
he finds the Italian poet the supreme of literary- 
figures; in Shakespeare he concedes that place by 
impHcation to the English poet. In the same 
essay he declares that no one can imitate Shake- 
speare "by even so much as the gait of a single 
verse"; in a subsequent essay he admits that this 
is not only possible but that it actually occurs.^ 

» Cf. Works, iv., 406; ii., 78; i., 128. 

» Ibid,, iii., 36; Latest Literary Essays, p. 120. 



132 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Again in Shakespeare^ he expresses admiration for 
the poet whose ''poise of character . . . enabled 
him to be the greatest of poets and so unnoticeable 
a good citizen as to leave no incidents for biog- 
raphies. " Yet in another essay he demands: 
"If Shakespeare the man had been as marvellous 
a creature as the genius that wrote his plays, . . . 
would his contemporaries have left" him undistin- 
guished and unrecorded?^ In Chaucer he is eager 
to show from what mediocre antecedents the poet 
sprang with his "gracious worldliness. " What 
are the Chansons de Geste after all, he would ask. 
" Who after reading them — even . . . th.Q, Song of 
Roland — can remember much more than a cloud of 
battle-dust, through which the paladins loom dimly 
gigantic, and a strong verse flashes here and there 
like an angry sword? " "= But later, when he is not 
interested in exalting Chaucer, he says: "The 
Chanson de Roland is to me a very interesting and 
inspiring poem, certainly not to be named with 
the Iliad for purely Hterary charm, but equipped 
with the same moral qualities that have made that 
poem dearer to mankind than any other. " ^ This 
tendency to ignore the demands of critical detach- 
ment in favor of the author under discussion, is 
the rule rather than the exception. In Dry den, 
Lowell declares the poet "highest in the second 
class of poets," although he regards both Milton 

^ Works, ii., 244. 2 li)id.^ iii., 310. 

3 Latest Literary Essays, p. 147. 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 133 

and Spenser as poets of the second class and 
Dryden's superiors. In Pope, as has been pointed 
out, Lowell refrains from expressing his opinion 
that the author of the Rape of the Lock was not a 
poet, although that was his real belief. Discussing 
Pope as a man, he believes him guilty of ''very 
little real malice "^• in another essay (that on 
Dry den) he says: "Pope seems to have nursed his 
grudge, and then, watching his chance, to have 
squirted vitriol from behind a corner, rather glad 
than otherwise if it fell on the women of those he 
hated or envied."^ 

This partiality for the author tmder discussion 
probably seemed to Lowell only a phase of that 
sympathy which the critic should feel towards his 
subject. 3 But it was intrusive with Lowell and too 
often gave him the air of a special pleader. His judg- 
ments, in consequence, are confusing, if, as often 
happens, they are delivered in favor of the sub- 
ject of the essay in the ardor of to-day and against 
him in obiter dicta in the calm of to-morrow. 

Lowell seems honestly to have desired detach- 
ment in treating the subjects of his critical essays. 
The very extravagances into which he fell in 
Rousseau; the repression of his own opinion of 
Pope as poet; his fear of being affected by his 
partiaHty for Carlyle; even his apologia of the 

^ Works, iv., 49, Essay on Pope. » Ihid., iii., 177. 

3 "Without sympathy there can be no right understanding," 
said Lowell. (Article on Swift, Nation, April 13, 1876.) 



134 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

eighteenth century in Gray, all go to prove that 
whether he were treating a classic or a contem- 
porary, either as man or as writer, or whether he 
were sketching a period, he was eager to be fair. 

All things considered, his attitude can hardly be 
called judicial, except perhaps in the Lowellian 
sense. In Lowell's case "judicial attitude" has a 
meaning of its own. As one finds it in Sainte- 
Beuve, it means a cool aloofness which sets the 
facts before the reader quite uncolored by the 
prejudice, enthusiasm, or even by the opinion of 
the critic. There is no marshaling of short- 
comings on the heels of excellences, each set being 
labeled by the critic. Of Sainte-Beuve indeed 
one is almost unconscious ; it is his business to see 
that the facts are placed before you; you are the 
jury, not he. Yet it is he who admits this set of 
facts or rules out that ; he does not harangue about 
the irrelevant, he excludes it. And so far in the 
background does Sainte-Beuve remain all this 
time that one forgets the power of his function. 
He knows perfectly well what the reader's con- 
clusions will be and yet they have all the appear- 
ance of being arrived at in entire independence of 
the critic. But with Lowell, judicial attitude means 
something entirely different. He is always in the 
foreground, pointing out that the author imder 
discussion has this excellence and that short- 
coming. Sometimes he gives grounds for his 
judgments; just as often he does not. In either 



HIS JUDICIAL ATTITUDE 135 

case the judgment is given not with the dispassion 
of a judge, but with the finality of an autocrat. 
At times he descends from the critical bench and 
argues in behalf of the author under consideration 
with all the warmth of a special pleader. Such 
detachment as Sainte-Beuve's we never find. 
Lowell's final conclusions have the air of being 
reached by an intuitive process, the resultant of 
which, however it may exceed his grounds of 
judgment, the reader is to accept as the utterance 
of an ultimate tribunal. Lowell does not mean to 
be tmjust. For the most part he is not. But 
the justice of his final conclusions does not depend 
on his maintenance of a judicial attitude. So far 
as the judicial attitude is apparent in Lowell, it is 
for the most part an endeavor to arrive at justice 
by striking an average between praise on the one 
hand and blame on the other. 



CHAPTER V 
penetration: the ultimate gift 

LOWELL in his best studies likes to call atten- 
tion to the various single qualities of his 
author, merely mentioning some, expanding on 
others, but in the end suggesting the varied round 
of excellences and shortcomings. When one 
finishes his best essays, one has touched upon the 
works of the authors under discussion from several 
points of view. Whatever careful study would 
disclose to the eyes of a man of cultivation and 
taste, Lowell sees. His own appreciation of the 
beauties he points out becomes now and then a 
delight which seems to revel in a translation of 
its own impressions into poetic prose. Now he 
translates his impression of a single quality, as 
where he says of Milton's descriptions: In them 
"he seems to circle like an eagle bathing in the blue 
stream of air, controlling with his eye broad 
sweeps of champaign or of sea, and rarely fulmin- 
ing in the sudden swoop of intenser expression."' 
Now he translates his impressions of a work, as of 

* Works, iv., 99, 

136 



PENETRATION 137 

Chaucer*s best tales or of the best passages in 
Wordsworth, and his translations are always 
beautiful. What could be finer than this on 
Spenser's poetry? 

Other poets have held their mirrors up to nature, . . . 
but Spenser's is a magic glass in which we see . . . 
visionary shapes conjured up by the wizard's art from 
some confusedly remembered past or some impossible 
future; it is like one of those still pools of medieval 
legend which covers some sunken city of the antique 
world ; a reservoir in which all our dreams seem to have 
been gathered. As we float tipon it, we see that it 
pictures faithfully enough the summer-clouds that 
drift over it, the trees that grow about its margin, but 
in the midst of these shadowy echoes of actuality we 
catch faint tones of bells that seem blown to us from 
beyond the horizon of time, and, looking down into 
the clear depths, catch glimpses of towers and far- 
shining knights and peerless dames that waver and are 
gone. Is it a world that ever was, or shall be, or can 
be, or but a delusion?^ 

One feels that such a passage as this, or as the 
analogy between the Divina Commedia and a 
Gothic cathedral, belongs to poetry. ^ Such trans- 
lations of impression were not inadvertent. Said 
Lowell in 1855: "A lecturer on science has only 
to show how much he knows — the lecturer on 
poetry can only be sure how much he feels. ' ' ^ This 

^ Works, iv., 348. 2 Ihid., iv., 236- 

3 Lectures on the English Poets, p. 3. 



138 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

tendency for translating feeling into figurative 
language was, as has been already pointed out, 
one of the chief characteristics of Lowell's criticism 
all his life. In 1842 he speaks of Chapman, 
"whose rustling vines and calm snow-capt head, 
which seems made to slumber in the peaceful blue, 
are on the sudden deluged with surging lava from 
the burning heart below."' Even as a critic, 
Lowell the boy was emphatically father of Lowell 
the man. It is in such interpretative criticism as 
this that he is at his best. He seems to find ab- 
stract questions penitential to discuss, but once he 
is free to tap the wellsprings of his feelings, he is 
at ease. 

That this should be the case is not surprising. 
Lowell had taste and imagination; both gifts 
helped to make his impressions true and his trans- 
lation of them poetical in conception and phrasing. 
At times his interpretations are not drawn out 
but condensed, and gain from their brevity and 
suggestiveness something of epigrammatic point. 
Chapman's eloquence, "nobly fine" and "robus- 
tious," at times "seems to be shouted through a 
speaking-trumpet in a gale of wind. "^ His essay 
on Pope is summed up with a striking antithesis : 
"Measured by any high standard of imagination, 
he will be found wanting ; tried by any standard 
of wit, he is unrivaled. " The grace of inspiration 

^ Early Writings, p. 188. (Boston Miscellany, 1842.) 
» Old English Dramatists, p. 90. 



PENETRATION 139 

was with him when he wrote of Thoreau: '*As we 
read him, it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a 
diary and become its own Montaigne. " ^ It would 
be difficult to find in a volume of appreciation two 
lines more happily suggestive. 

This felicity of phrase is not uncommon in 
Lowell and flashes out when most unexpected. 
He declines to discuss the originality of Keats, for 
originality is not definable ; we all have intellectual 
ancestors: '' In the parliament of the present every 
man represents a constituency of the past. ' ' ^ The 
things of the spirit survive the wealth of nations; 
who could have put the thought more beautifully? 
"The garners of Sicily are empty now, but the bees 
from all climes still fetch honey from the tiny 
garden-plot of Theocritus."^ Much of the same 
idea again is in Lowell's mind, the deathlessness 
of those pages touched by "the authentic soul 
of man," when he said: "Oblivion looks in the 
face of the Grecian Muse only to forget her er- 
rand. "'^ It is small wonder that the man who 
could achieve so many phrases, felicitous, illu- 
mined with fancy, quotable, should himself escape 
criticism by disarming the advocatus diaholi. 

Though Lowell, it will be remembered, some- 
times fell short in the kind of taste which ob- 
serves the proprieties in the treatment of persons 
and in the expression of thought, he was rarely at 

^ Works, i., 381. ' Ihid, i., 241. 

3 Ihid., vi., 174. 4 Ihid., vi., 165. 



I40 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

fault in that kind of taste which never mistakes 
poor verse or prose for good. His papers on the 
Elizabethan dramatists, published in the Boston 
Miscellany in 1842, are little more than collections 
of excerpts from the dramatists considered; in no 
case does the selection fail to justify the taste of the 
critic. In Conversations and again in Old English 
Dramatists, in both of which the excerpts are 
numerous, the case is the same. In several 
instances indeed, the Lowell of 1887 showed ap- 
proval of his earlier judgment, by quoting pas- 
sages which he had cited forty-five years before. 
Throughout his essays he quotes passages he 
admires, now from Chaucer, now from Dryden, 
now from Spenser or Shakespeare or some minor 
poet ; all with scarce an exception have imaginative 
appeal and grace of diction. It is worthy of note 
that the presence of these qualities rather than 
of conspicuous moral elements gave the determin- 
ing impulse to his choice. 

Imagination indeed with its various phases and 
distinctions allured him. He liked to discuss it, 
to point out that in its higher form it is "the 
faculty that shapes, gives unity of design and 
balanced gravitation of parts"; that it has a 
secondary office where it is interpreter of the 
artist's conception into words; that there is a dis- 
tinction between the two modes of performing this 
function. Lowell once or twice tries to apply his 
distinctions, as where he concedes to Shakespeare 



PENETRATION 141 

the creative imagination which bodies forth the 
thought, and to Milton the pictorial imagination, 
which merely images it forth. ^ But such subtle- 
ties seemed to bore him and he was content for the 
most part to use the term in a general sense. 
In Dante's imagination there is "intense realism" ; 
Spenser was ''more habitually possessed by his 
imagination than is usual even with poets. "^ 
Taking imagination in a general sense he some- 
times suggested distinctions of kind, as where he 
declares Keats amply possessed of "penetrative 
and sympathetic imagination,"^ and Carlyle of 
"conceptive imagination vigorous beyond any in 
his generation. " 4 

Lowell's references to imagination are so fre- 
quent, his tone in conceding it is so certain, that 
one notes with siirprise his failure to perceive it. 
He denied creative imagination to the author of 
Duty and Laodamia and Intimations of Immortality y ^ 
going so far as to say: "Wordsworth was wholly 
void of that shaping imagination which is the 
highest criterion of a poet. "^ He was uncertain 
whether the great gift of his favorite Calderon were 
imagination or fancy. In his essay on Chaucer 
there is no mention of Troilus and Criseyde, 
although the imagination which created Criseyde 
is akin to Shakespeare's own. Robert Greene, 
whose Friar Bacon and James IV. are "bright- 

* Works, iii., 40. ^ Ibid., iv., 343. ^ Ibid., i., 243. 

4 Ibid., ii., 90. s Ibid., iii., 35. ^ Ibid., ii., 78. 



142 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

some" with imagination and whose Dorothea 
neither Chaucer nor Shakespeare would have 
scorned to own, is "naught,"' and "had a genius 
for being dull at all times. "^ 

If Lowell's frequent discussions of the imagina- 
tion lead one to concede him an ability to recog- 
nize it which he sometimes disappoints, one 
hesitates to accuse him of defective penetration. 
Many things would seem to proclaim the falsity of 
such a judgment. "Rousseau cries, 'I will bare 
my heart to you!' and, throwing open his waist- 
coat, makes us the confidants of his dirty linen. "^ 
There is a gHmpse of Rousseau the poseur which 
remains in the memory. Again: "History, in the 
true sense, he (Carlyle) does not and cannot write, 
for he looks on mankind as a herd without volition, 
and without moral force. "^ And again: "The 
radical vice of his (Thoreau's) theory of life was 
that he confounded physical with spiritual remote- 
ness from men . " ^ There is penetration here . Each 
statement, one expects, will be used as a basis 
on which far-reaching explanations can be made. 
If Rousseau were a poseur^ did this weakness 

* Old English Dramatists, p. 19. 

* Ibid.y p. 20. Lowell's animosity becomes explicable but not 
his denial of all virtue to so imaginative a poet as Greene when 
one reads: "He (Greene) it was that called Shakespeare 'an 
upstart crow beautified with our feathers,' as if any one could 
have any use for feathers from such birds as he." Old English 
Dramatists, p. 19. 

3 Works, ii., 261. 4 Ibid., ii., 118. s Ibid., i., 373. 



PENETRATION 143 

modify his influence ? Was it a fundamental weak- 
ness? Did it betray itself in any essential ways? 
How far is it reconcilable with the "faith and . . . 
ardor of conviction" which the critic says were in 
him? Lowell does not state. He discusses in- 
stead the absence of sincerity in autobiographies 
in general. If Carlyle were incapable of writing 
history, why not point out his important lapses in 
the French Revolution and in Frederick? Why not 
make the weakness of Carlyle 's philosophy prove 
itself the basic weakness of Carlyle the historian, 
and show how one fundamental misconception 
has many ramifications? To say that Carlyle 's 
"historical compositions are wonderful prose 
poems"'; to declare that his "appreciation is less 
psychological than physical and external,"^ is 
to remain on the surface of things and to toy with 
the incidental. Such points have their place ; but 
their place is subsidiary. If the radical vice of 
Thoreau's theory of Hfe were his confotinding of 
physical with spiritual remoteness from men, why 
is this vice not considered as radical and made to 
explain his idiosyncrasies? Why should Thoreau 
make such a mistake and how came he to persist 
in it? Has it any bearing on his work? What 
connection has it with his egotism, with his senti- 
mentalism? To accuse Thoreau of morbid self- 
consciousness, of unhealthiness of mind, of lack 

^ Works, ii., 102. ' Ibid., ii., 103. 



144 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

of humor, is to hide the flash of penetration in a 
mass of cloud. 

This weakness of Lowell points the way to 
others. It has been said that he seldom failed 
to notice the various qualities of an author. Some 
he discusses or illustrates; others he merely men- 
tions. Their inter-relation seems to elude him. 
In Dry den he speaks of the poet's faith in himself, 
tendency to exaggeration, inequality, strength of 
understanding, and so on. He points out quali- 
ties as if they had as Httle vital connection with one 
another or with the poet to whom they belonged as 
his coat or hat or gloves. Lowell himself seems 
conscious that an array of quaHties which might be 
found in many poets tells nothing in particular 
about Dryden. At the end of the essay he seeks 
to emphasize the poet's salient qualities. This 
passage and the method are typical : 

Was he, then, a great poet? Hardly, in the narrowest 
definition. But he was a strong thinker who some- 
times carried common sense to a height where it 
catches the light of a diviner air, and warmed reason 
till it had well-nigh the illuminating property of 
intuition ... He sees, among other things, that a 
man who undertakes to write should first have a 
meaning perfectly defined to himself, and then should 
be able to set it forth clearly in the best words. This 
is precisely Dry den's praise, and ... to read him is 
as bracing as a northwest wind ... In mind and 
manner his foremost quality is energy. In ripeness of 



PENETRATION 145 

mind and bluff heartiness of expression, he takes rank 
with the best. His phrase is always a shortcut to his 
sense . . . He had . . . the gift of the right word. 
And if he does not, like one or two of the greater 
masters of song, stir our sympathies by that inde- 
finable aroma so magical in arousing the subtile 
associations of the soul, he has this in common with 
the few great writers, that the winged seeds of his 
thought embed themselves in the memory and germi- 
nate there. ^ 

There can be little question about the soundness of 
all this. But why stop here? Are these qualities 
peculiar to Dry den? What one or two of them or 
what combination of them explains him? Is the 
poet thus designated John Dryden and no one 
else? Are these qualities a sufficient explanation 
of St. Cecilia's Day, the Hind and Panther, Absalom 
and Achitophely and the lyrics in the dramas? 
Do we knov/ this Dryden, his mind or his genius? 
Do we know what was fundamental in them, from 
which other characteristics had their rise? Have 
we got at the very pulse of the machine or have we 
merely been directed to a mass of cog-wheels and 
pulleys, all unassembled, with the remark that this 
one is large and that one small, but never a word 
about the interplay of parts or the function of each 
in the total mechanism? Lowell realizes this 
weakness; he will point out the radical element 
in Dryden's greatness: ''What gave and secures 

^ Works, iii., 188 flE. 
xo 



146 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

for him this singular eminence? To put it in a 
single word, I think that his qualities and faculties 
were in that rare combination which makes char- 
acter. This gave flavor to whatever he wrote, — a 
very rare quality."' One cannot but ask: Is 
that the answer? 

What is the ultimate quality of Keats ? ' ' Enough 
that we recognize in Keats that indefinable new- 
ness and unexpectedness which we call genius."^ 
Is this the answer? If so, how shall we explain 
Euclid and Napoleon and Leonardo da Vinci, to 
say nothing of the great names of literature? 
What is the secret of Dante's power? "The secret 
of Dante's power is not far to seek. Whoever can 
express himself with the full force of unconscious 
sincerity will be found to have uttered something 
ideal and universal."^ Is that the answer? 
And Chaucer — what of him? "In short, Chaucer 
had that fine literary sense which is as rare as 
genius, and, united with it, as it was in him, 
assures an immortality of fame.""* Is that the 
answer? Was fine literary sense, united to genius, 
peculiar to Chaucer? United as they were in him ? 
That is just the question; and it goes unanswered. 

In his essay on Wordsworth, ^ Richard Holt 
Hutton lays down what he considers the ultimate 
characteristic of Wordsworth the poet : 

^ Works, iii., i88. ^ Ibid., i., 242. 3 Ihid., iv., 258. 

4 Ibid., iii., 331. s Essays in Literary Criticism. 



PENETRATION 147 

He could detach his mind from the commonplace 
series of impressions which are generated by common- 
place objects or events, resist and often reverse the 
current of emotion to which ordinary minds are lia- 
ble, and triumphantly justify the strain of rapture 
with which he celebrated what excites either no feel- 
ing, or weary feeling, or painful feeling, in the mass of 
unreflecting men. 

The essay which follows is an exposition of that 
sentence. No phase of the poet's mind or art is 
isolated; the inter-relations are made clear, and 
constantly the critic returns to emphasize again 
the ultimate characteristic of Wordsworth's genius. 
When Hutton says: "Wordsworth . . . was al- 
most a miser in his reluctance to trench upon the 
spiritual capital at his disposal," we recognize 
the critic's penetration in the remark. But he does 
not stop there ; he expands and explains and shows 
the relation between this "spiritual frugality" 
and that characteristic of the poet which he had 
already laid down as fundamental. When he 
puts his finger on the vital spot of Wordsworth's 
faculty, he evokes our assent, not a shock of sur- 
prise at a deduction whose premises have been but 
vaguely suggested. 

His (Wordsworth's) poetic faculty lies, I think, in 
contemplatively seizing the characteristic individual 
influences which all living things, from the very 
smallest of earth or air up to man and the Spirit of 



148 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

God, radiate around them to every mind that will 
surrender itself to their expressive power. 

Here is penetration; coming as it does, it is not 
like a flash of lightning in the dark, but like the 
sunlight, steady, luminous, making bright far cor- 
ners and dim recesses. 

When Matthew Arnold writes on Wordsworth, ' 
he insists upon the acceptance of his own under- 
standing of poetic greatness: ''The noble and 
profoimd application of ideas to life is the most 
essential part of poetic greatness." He continues: 

A great poet receives his distinctive character of 
superiority from his application, under the conditions 
immutably fixed by the laws of poetic beauty and 
poetic truth, ... of the ideas 

" On man, on nature, and on human life," 

which he has acquired for himself. 

The essay is an endeavor to show that Wordsworth's 
superiority as a poet arises from "his powerful 
application to his subject" of such ideas. There 
is no deviation from the question; the critic is 
insistent on his primary definition; he constantly 
recurs to it, each time letting his exposition become 
a little more comprehensive and yet keeping it 
specific. His final explanation of the poet is 
consequent from his premises; it is penetrating, as 
Hutton's is penetrating, and for a similar reason : 

» Essays in Criticism (2d series). 



PENETRATION 149 

Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the extra- 
ordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy 
offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the 
simple primary affections and beauties ; and because of 
the extraordinary power with which in case after case, 
he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make 
us share it. 

One may not accept the conclusions of Arnold 
and Hutton ; one may quarrel with Arnold's defini- 
tion of poetry. But one cannot fail to perceive 
that their penetration is an essentially different 
thing from Lowell's. 

Such conclusions as these of Hutton and Arnold 
do more than throw light on the quality of Lowell's 
penetration. They make clear the evil of Lowell's 
method. Laying out to view, as he did, an array 
of separate qualities of different degrees of im- 
portance, and treating each in isolated fashion, 
without any reference to some radical principle 
either in the mind or art of the author, Lowell 
cannot be acquitted of sinning against rhetoric 
on the one hand and against criticism on the 
other. His essays lack that unity which comes 
from the presence of a dominant idea, a thesis to 
be supported, or a point of view steadily main- 
tained. They leave the reader's mind confused 
by the array of imrelated qualities mustered by 
the critic, whose endeavor toward the end of his 
essay to concentrate upon some ultimate quality as 
the explanation of the author, results in gener- 



I50 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

alities. Characteristics, instead of being focused 
into one, and that circumstanced and defined till 
it fits the single author with a nice and inevitable 
finality, are dissipated into the vague of a general 
term. Not that Lowell always even makes an 
endeavor to reach the ultimate quality. In Spenser 
he seems to come close to it without intention 
when he declares : 

The exultation with which love sometimes sub- 
tilizes the nerves of coarsest men so that they feel 
and see not the thing as it seems to others, but the 
beauty of it, the joy of it, the soul of eternal youth 
that is in it, would appear to have been the normal 
condition of Spenser. 

But if he has touched the robes of the goddess he 
seems not to know it; for he does not make exal- 
tation of mind serve to explain the other qualities 
of Spenser which he indicates, — ^his joyousness, 
his epicureanism of language, his fervor. It is 
much the same in Dryden : he seems to have his 
finger on the poet*s pulse, but soon loses it. 

This preponderance in him (Dryden) of the reasoning 
over the intuitive faculties, the one always there, the 
other flashing in when you least expect it, accounts 
for that inequality and even incongruousness in his 
writings which makes one revise one's judgment 
at every tenth page. ^ 

^ Works, iii., 120. 



PENETRATION 151 

Does it account for other things, this preponder- 
ance, for virtues as well as vices? And what of 
this judgment which it forces us to revise at every 
tenth page? "He is a prose writer, with a kind 
of ^olian attachment"'; he was not primarily a 
poet. ^ And yet, ' ' poet he surely was intus^ though 
not always w cute/'^ and so on. Is it too much to 
say that though Lowell has his finger on the poet's 
pulse he loses it and that his observations tend 
to confuse instead of to clarify ? In Shakespeare he 
masses up in the last few pages the poet's quali- 
ties; each was possessed in the highest degree; 
there is no suggestion of a radical property of the 
poet's mind or art in which all inhere, no sugges- 
tion of any inter-relation between them. Out of 
the aggregate of qualities, our conception of 
the poet wavers like a creature of the mist: if 
sincere shall we know it for Dante, if original 
for Wordsworth, if endowed with character for 
Dry den? 

It is unfortimate that Lowell ignored the histori- 
cal method or felt it too difficult for his powers. 
It is equally unfortunate that for similar reasons 
his was not a biographical method of the type of 
Sainte-Beuve's. If the impressions left upon us 
by Lowell's essays are vague, so also are the figures 
of their subjects. Even the outer appearance of 
a poet helps to persuade us of his reality, and to 
make him ultimately more comprehensible because 

^ Works, in., 120. 'Ibid., iii., 123. 3 Ibid., iii., 127. 



152 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

more like ourselves. Chaucer's 

downcast eyes, half -shy, half-meditative, the sensuous 
mouth, the broad brow, drooping with weight of 
thought, and yet with an inexpugnable youth shining 
out of it as from the morning forehead of a boy, are all 
noticeable, and not less so their harmony of placid 
tenderness. We are struck, too, with the smoothness 
of the face as of one who thought easily, whose phrase 
flowed naturally, and who had never puckered his 
brow over an unmanageable verse. ' 

For a moment one feels that Chaucer was of the 
earth earthy, a man like ourselves. If Chaucer's 
life is a secret well-nigh buried with him, how he 
would seem to live again, how much new vitality 
would have a renascence in his works if only his 
times were drawn for us ! What were those brave 
old days like, when men went on pilgrimages 
over-seas or at home in England to the shrine of 
Canterbury? When Wat Tyler could ride into 
London with a rabble at his heels and the hand- 
some boy-king could thrust a knife into his breast 
and put down a rebellion with a smile and a 
promise? One wonders whether Lowell felt that 
this method lay beyond his powers, or whether 
he failed to see its advantages. 

The biographical method of Sainte-Beuve, 
Lowell himself attests, makes the French critic's 
subject luminous. =" But in the American critic's 
essays for the most part there is little biography, 

* Works, iii., 294. » Ibid., ii., 166. 



PENETRATION 153 

except of a perfunctory kind. Dry den represents 
his best endeavor to interweave biography with 
criticism. The poet's life as a chronological 
sequence is followed to some extent in order to 
make clear the development of his genius. Bom 
in 1 63 1, his earliest verses, those on the death of 
Hastings, "are as bad as they can be." After 
ten fallow years he at length makes his appearance 
again in heroic stanzas on the death of Cromwell. 
"Next we have, in 1660, Astrcea Redux on the 
* happy restoration' of Charles II.," in which one 
can "forebode little of the ftdl-grown Dryden but 
his defects." Meanwhile Dryden's taste gradually 
rises — as his prefaces attest — ^from "Cowley to 
Milton, from Comeille to Shakespeare."^ It was 
the Annus Mirahilis written in his thirty-seventh 
year by which he "won a general acknowledgment 
of his powers."^ Dryden as a dramatist is next 
taken up: "In the thirty-two years between 1662 
and 1694, h^ produced twenty-five plays." Here 
ends the attempt at following the sequence of 
Dryden's life; the rest of the essay is a discussion 
of the poet as "satirist and pleader in verse," his 
prefaces and translations and his various general 
qualities. In Dante, Lowell approaches nearest 
among his essays to that method which in the 
hands of Sainte-Beuve became not merely bio- 
graphical, but psychological. Dante's writings, 
he says, "are all (with the possible exception of 

^ Works ^ iii., 123. ^ Ihid., iii., 133. 



154 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Be Vulgari Eloquio) autobiographic, and all of 
them, including that, are parts of a mutually 
related system of which the central part is the 
individuality and experience of the poet." The 
critic tries to make the various works explain 
the poet. The Vita Nuova, for example, 

recounts the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, 
showing how his grief for her loss turned his thoughts 
first inward upon his own consciousness, and, failing 
all help there, gradually upward through philosophy 
to religion and so from a world of shadows to one 
of eternal substances.^ 

Dante's other works are taken up briefly in turn 
and the critic hurries on to the Divina Commedia. 
The essay soon becomes a commentary on Dante's 
masterpiece, with discussions now and then of his 
qualities — ^his conservatism, his mystical turn of 
mind, his endowment of memory and genius, and 
so on. Here Lowell goes back to his usual method : 
an enumeration of characteristics not necessarily 
having inter-relation, not emanating from the same 
radical elements in the poet's mind or art. He is 
at pains to explain Dante's philosophy, the "dis- 
crepancy between the Lady of the Vita Nuova 
and her of the Convito'' and the like, nor ''does he 
speak without book." But when all is said, does 
Lowell reveal to us the development of that 
strangely isolated individual, either as moral 

^ Works, iv., 148. 



PENETRATION 155 

being or as poet? Does he make us feel the unity 
of this man who as Prior /)f Florence could exile 
his dearest friend Cavalcanti, and yet weep to see 
the hapless lovers blown for evermore upon the 
shrilling winds of Hell; of this poet whose equal 
vision could gaze upon the horrors of Malebolge 
and the celestial splendors of the Infinite? In a 
word, has Lowell penetrated into the heart of this 
Dante, and realized beneath his various qualities 
the psychological unity which imderlay the man 
and the poet? One thinks of Sainte-Beuve, of 
his power of reanimating the men and women of 
the past, of placing them over against friends and 
foes, of making them reveal their works, and their 
works in turn reveal them, until we view them 
through the eyes of the sanest and broadest and 
most penetrating of their contemporaries. One 
thinks of Carlyle, of those "portrait-devouring 
eyes" of his, which would have looked into the 
soul of Dante and made both heart and mind of 
him yield their secrets. If one seems to demand 
too much of Lowell by the implication of such 
comparisons, there is Arnold, a critic in his own 
tongue and of his own immediate time. 

Writing of Keats, ^ Arnold points out that Keats 
is eminent for the sensuousness of his poetry. 
"The question with some people will b^, whether 
he is anything else. ' ' From one angle, Keats seems 
to have no character, no self-control, qualities 

^ Essays in Criticism (2d Series). 



156 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

indispensable for the great artist. Here is Arnold's 
thesis, direct, simple, falling back upon his theory 
of poetry as an interpretation of life : 

We who believe Keats to have been by his promise, at 
any rate, if not fully by his performance, one of the 
very greatest of English poets, and who believe also 
that a merely sensuous man cannot either by promise 
or by performance be a very great poet, because poetry 
interprets life, and so large and noble a part of life 
is outside of such a man's ken, — we cannot but look 
for signs in him of something more than sensuousness, 
for signs of character and virtue. 

And with deftness and insight, the critic sets 
about his task. He quotes Houghton and George 
Keats in attestation of the poet's high qualities, and 
he looks ''for whatever illustrates and confirms" 
their testimony. Keats' own words are quoted: 
one gets to understand that this sensuous and sen- 
sitive consumptive was possessed of admirable wis- 
dom and temper; of a determination to '*fag on as 
others do at periodical literature," to avoid en- 
dangering his independence and his self-respect; 
of fortitude in the face of imjust criticism, and so 
on. And out of it all ''the thing to be seized on 
is that Keats had flint and iron in him, that he had 
character." And what else of him? 

" I have loved the principle of beauty in all things " 
and " if I had had time I would have made myself re- 



PENETRATION 157 

membered." He has made himself remembered and 
remembered as no merely sensuous poet could be; 
and he has done it by having " loved the principle of 
beauty in all things." 

In his Keats, Lowell sketches the poet's life. 
He tells us that Keats "longed for fame, but longed 
above all to deserve it " ; that he took the attacks 
upon Endymion in a manly way. ''A man cannot 
have a sensuous nature and be pachydermatous 
at the same time, and if he be imaginative as well 
as sensuous, he suffers just in proportion to the 
amoimt of his imagination. ' ' Keats finally goes to 
Italy broken in health, and we are given a letter 
of his from Naples, feverish, pitiful. He dies 
and is buried in Rome with that pathetic epitaph 
upon his gravestone.' One asks: Is that all? Is 
there nothing beneath that eagerness to deserve 
fame, that manly bearing up under attack, that 
sensuous nature and imaginative temperament, 
the feverish morbidity of that letter from Naples? 
Is there not a radical unity there which makes 
all these things congruous? One need not believe 
that Arnold has gone to the root of the matter; 
but there is penetration, psychological penetration, 
in his brief study. 

Lowell, one remembers, was essentially a man 
of books. It is significant that he cotdd write: 
'*Nor am I offended with this odor of the library 

^ " Here lies one whose name was writ in water." 



158 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

that hangs about Gray, for it recalls none but de- 
lightful associations." ' The tenor of his way was 
apart from the highroad of men, far from the heat 
and din of the market-place. One associates him 
with Cambridge, with long hours spent over 
favorite volumes, with a handful of intimates at 
whist or dinner, or fulfilling the duties of class- 
room or sanctum. Did he understand men? 
One recalls his letter to Briggs in 1845, lamenting 
that as a man he was not appreciated or under- 
stood, and that other letter to Holmes with its 
pert condemnation of a man ten years his senior 
whom he scarcely knew. Then there is his letter 
to the editor of Putnam'' s, condemning as the 
*'mob" that public which was bored by his im- 
possible comic poem; there are the recondite 
allusions constantly cropping out in his political 
essays and the sophomoricisms in his literary 
studies which offend good taste — one wonders if 
the man who was guilty of these lapses really 
understood men himself. In Lowell's letters one 
finds no evidence of psychological penetration 
and the same is true of those of his dispatches from 
Madrid which we now have as Impressions of 
Spain, One gets delightftd sketches of men from 
the outside, like that of Franklin Pierce, ^ and that 
more elaborate one of Canovas in the Spanish 
dispatches.^ There is no quarrel with these; it 

^ Latest Literary Essays, p. 39. 

" Letters, i., 302 ff. ^ Impressions of Spain, p. 29 ff. 



PENETRATION 159 

may even be that one has no right to expect more. 
But one has a right to look for psychological in- 
sight in the critical essays ; if it is wanting in them 
can they be called critical in any serious sense? 
This question is worth further consideration. 

In his essay on Carlyle, LoweU discusses Carlyle 
the man. * ' In the earlier part of his literary career 
Mr. Carlyle was the preacher up of sincerity, man- 
liness, and a living faith. ... He had intense 
convictions and he made disciples." He became 
popular: "His fervor, his oddity of manner, his 
pugnacious paradox, drew the crowd." Once 
become popular, "he must attract, he must aston- 
ish." Why was this necessity upon him? Be- 
cause the excitement of making a sensation becomes 
a necessity of the successful author.^ Carlyle, he 
goes on, "continues to be a voice crying in the 
wilderness, but no longer a voice with any earnest 
conviction behind it." Whether this conclusion 
be just or not, one need not stop to inquire. But 
one is obliged to ask, is there psychological pene- 
tration behind that conclusion.^ Has the crier- 
down of sham become himself a "mountebank of 
genius" because the excitement of making a sensa- 
tion becomes a necessity of the successful author? 
In Rousseau, after following faithfully in the wake 
of the critic, one is finally forced to ask: Is Rous- 
seau after all only a baffling psychological anomaly, 
an aggregate of irreconcilable contradictions? 

» Works, ii., 107. The italics are mine. 



i6o LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Here is the critic's answer: "It would be sheer 
waste of time to hunt Rousseau through all his 
doublings of inconsistency, and run him to earth 
in every new paradox." When Lowell writes of 
Gray, he shows a certain penetration bom of 
sympathy for one in whom he saw a weakness 
akin to his own. Bonstetten, he says, records the 
melancholy from which Gray suffered, and for 
which Sainte-Beuve accounted by alleging "la 
sterilite d'un talent poetique si distingue, si rare, 
mais si avare." Says Lowell: 

Sainte-Beuve is perhaps partly right, but it may be 
fairly surmised that the remorse for intellectual indo- 
lence should have had some share in making Gray 
unwilling to recall the time when he was better em- 
ployed than in filling in coats-of-arms on the margin 
of Dugdale and correcting the Latin of Linnaeus. 

And behind that intellectual indolence — what? 
... It is worth while to quote Arnold. Writing 
on Gray, Arnold also quotes Bonstetten; then he 
adds: 

Sainte-Beuve, who was much attracted and interested 
by Gray, doubts whether Bonstetten's explanation of 
him is admissible^; the secret of Gray's melancholy he 
finds rather in the sterility of his poetic talent, . . . 
in the poet's despair at his own unproductiveness. 
But to explain Gray, we must do more than allege his 

^ Bonstetten had said: "I believe that Gray had never loved; 
this was the key to the riddle. " 



PENETRATION i6i 

sterility, as we must look further than to his seclusion 
at Cambridge. What caused his sterility? Was it 
his ill-health, his hereditary gout? . . . What gave 
the power to Gray's reclusion and ill-health to induce 
his sterility?^ 

Arnold's answer is this: Gray fell upon an age of 
prose; ''with the qualities of mind and soul of a 
genuine poet," he was "bom out of date, a man 
whose full spiritual flowering was impossible."^ 
Whether or not one agree with Arnold's conclusion 
one comes to realize that there is a difference 
between that penetration which stops short and 
that other which seeks to pierce to the heart of 
things. One might go on, examining the essays 
in detail; the conclusion is inescapable: the quest 
for anything approaching sustained psychological 
penetration will go imre warded. 

This weakness for stopping short of the ultimate 
betrays itself in other ways. In Lessing, Lowell 
discusses the German type of mind, its "inability 
or disinclination to see a thing as it really is, unless 
it be a matter of science." ^ But still it is a thor- 
ough mind to which we owe much. He goes on : 

The sense of heaviness which creeps over the reader 
from so many German books is mainly due, we suspect, 
to the language, which seems well-nigh incapable of 
that aerial perspective so delightful in first-rate French 

^ Essays in Criticism (2d series), p. 90 ff. 

* Ihid., p. 92 jBf. 3 Works, ii., 163. 



i62 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

and even English writing. But there must also be in 
the national character an insensibility to proportion, a 
want of that instinctive discretion which we call tact. ^ 

Speaking of the Germans, Arnold says : 

You have the Germanic genius : steadiness with honesty. 
. . . Steadiness with honesty; the danger for a 
national spirit thus composed is the humdrum, the 
plain and ugly, the ignoble: in a word, das Gemeine, 
die Gemeinheit . . . The excellence of a national 
spirit thus composed is freedom from whim, fiightiness, 
perseverance; patient fidelity to Nature, — in a word, 
science. . . The universal dead-level of plainness and 
homeliness, the lack of all beauty and distinction in 
form and feature, the slowness and clumsiness of the 
language . . . this is the weak side.* 

One sees that Arnold has delved under Lowell 
and sought the ultimate. 

Such weakness in penetration as one finds in 
Lowell, betrayed itself at times in his uncertain 
groping for the exact thought which he wanted to 
express. He seems to be seeking to pierce through 
his impressions to what was exact and basic be- 
yond them. 

How unlike is the operation of the imaginative faculty 
in him (Chaucer) and Shakespeare ! When the latter 
describes, his epithets imply always an impression on 

» Works t ii., 167. 2 Celtic Literaturet p. 74. 



PENETRATION 163 

the moral sense (so to speak) of the person who hears 
or sees. The sun "flatters the mountain-tops with 
sovereign eye"; the bending "weeds lacquey the dull 
stream" ; the shadow of the falcon "coucheth the fowl 
below" ; the smoke is "helpless" ; when Tarquin enters 
the chamber of Lucrece "the threshold grates the door 
to have him heard." His outward sense is merely a 
window through which the metaphysical eye looks 
forth, and his mind passes over at once from the simple 
sensation to the complex meaning of it, — feels with 
the object instead of merely feeling it. His imagina- 
tion is forever dramatizing. Chaucer gives only the 
direct impression made on the eye or ear.^ 

One can imagine readily with what incisiveness 
and yet with what breadth of implication Cole- 
ridge would have put that thought. Comparing 
Schiller and Shakespeare, Coleridge says: "Schiller 
has the material sublime; to produce an effect, he 
sets you a whole town on fire, and throws infants 
with their mothers into the flames, or locks up a 
father in an old tower. But Shakespeare drops a 
handkerchief and the same or greater effects 
follow,"^ Instances of this groping are common 
enough in Lowell. Regarding Spenser he says: 
"He is full of feeling, and yet of such a kind that 
we can neither say it is mere intellectual percep- 
tion of what is fair and good, nor yet associate it 
with that throbbing fervor which leads us to call 

^ Works, iii., 354 ff. 

2 Coleridge's Works , vi., 255 ff. 



1 64 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

sensibility by the physical name of heart." ^ 
Again : [Chaucer] 

is original, not in the sense that he thinks and says 
. . . what nobody can ever think and say again, but 
because he is always natural, because, if not always 
absolutely new, he is always delightfully fresh, because 
he sets before us the world as it honestly appeared to 
Geoffrey Chaucer, and not a world as it seemed proper 
to certain people that it ought to appear. * 

At other times, Lowell's weakness in penetra- 
tion gives one the feeling that words are being 
forced to do the duty of ideas. Shakespeare's 
moral, he tells us, "is the moral of worldly wisdom 
only heightened to the level of his wide- viewing 
mind, and made typical by the dramatic energy 
of his plastic nature." ^ The critic was not con- 
sciously superficial ; he had without doubt a feeling 
that there was a point to be made. But in instan- 
ces Hke these, he seems to have crystallized that 
feeling not into thought but into language. His 
phrasal power indeed, so characteristic of poets 
in their prose, sometimes wins us to an acceptance 
of his statements as charged with a thoughtfulness 
or penetration which they will not yield on analy- 
sis. The following is worth examination: 

Had Shakespeare been bom fifty years earlier, he 

^ Lowell's Works, iv., 326. 

' Ibid., iii., 361. * Ibid., iii., 324. 



PENETRATION 165 

would have been cramped by a book-language not 
yet flexible enough for the demands of rhythmic 
emotion, not yet sufficiently popularized for the 
natural and familiar expression of supreme thought, not 
yet so rich in metaphysical phrase as to render possible 
that ideal representation of the great passions which 
is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by 
practice and general consent to a definiteness of ac- 
centuation essential to ease and congruity of metrical 
arrangement.^ 

One recalls that Bemer's Froissart, in 1523, 
"made a landmark in our tongue"''; that Tyn- 
dale*s Translation of the New Testament, in 1525, 
"fixed our standard English once for all."^ One 
recalls that Chaucer, who had died in 1400, had 
surprised words "into grace, ease, and dignity 

^ Works, iii., 2. 

* Brooke, English Literature, p. 83. 

3 Ihid., p. 84. "Tyndale's translation of the New Testament 
is the most important philological monument of the first half 
of the sixteenth century, perhaps I should say of the whole period 
between Chaucer and Shakespeare." It "more than anything 
else contributed to shape and fix the sacred dialect, and establish 
the form which the Bible must permanently assume in an English 
dress. The best features of the translation of 161 1 are derived 
from the version of Tyndale, and thus that remarkable work 
has exerted, directly and indirectly, a more powerful influence 
on the English language than any other single production be- 
tween the ages of Richard II. and Queen Elizabeth." Marsh, 
English Language, p. 113. Says Brooke, English Literature, p. 
84: "Of the 6000 words of the Authorized Femow still in great 
part his (Tyndale's) translation, only 250 are not now in common 
use." 



i66 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

in their own despite," had achieved an "airiness 
of sentiment and expression, a felicity of phrase 
and an elegance of turn"; that he was great in 
narrative, in description, in command of satire, 
of pathos, of humor, and yet withal "he was also 
one of the best versifiers that ever made English trip 
and sing . . . every foot beats time to the tune 
of the thought." ' If, finally then, Chaucer in the 
latter part of the fourteenth century could make 
language to his will because "he was a great poet, 
to whom measure was a natural vehicle, " ^ are we 
to believe that a greater poet, with the language of 
Tyndale as well as that of Chaucer, would have 
made Venus and Adonis a less notable premibre 
(Buvre of genius had it been possible to come from 
his hands in 1543 instead of in 1593? 

This subject of the possibilities of language in 
the hands of a poet is a favorite one with Lowell. 
He is constantly emphasizing the value of diction. 
"Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree 
vassals of him who invents a new phrase or re- 
applies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a 
thousand times repeated becomes his at last who 
utters it best."^ He likes also to discuss a poet's 
use of words, and to trace influences of versifica- 
tion and of style. 4 

^ Works, iii., 329; 322; 351 ; 323; 352; 336. 
2 Ibid.y iii., 345. J Ibid., i., 245. 

* The influences he discovers are sometimes confusing: Milton's 
teacher in versification was Marlowe {Works, i., 277); later he 



PENETRATION 167 

It may be thought [he says in Spenser], that I lay too 
much stress on this single attribute of diction. But 
... it should be remembered that it is subtle per- 
fection of phrase and that happy coalescence of 
music and meaning, where each reinforces the other, 
that define a man as poet and make all ears con- 
verts and partisans.^ 

When Lowell comes to the discussion of prose 
writers, one expects him to pay the same attention 
to the influence of ideas as, in the case of poets, he 
paid to diction. Has Carlyle exerted a definite 
influence on the thought of his generation? He 
revealed, says Lowell, to those who listened to him 
in his prime, the "sublime reserves of power even 
the humblest may find in manliness, sincerity, 
and self-reliance."* We must be content with the 
indefinite statement that he had great value as 
''an inspirer and awakener."* As for Emerson: 
"What does he mean, quotha? He means inspir- 
ing hints, a divining-rod to your deeper nature." ^ 
Has he exerted a definite influence on his genera- 
tion? Lowell answers: much of the country's 
"intellectual emancipation was due to the stimu- 
lus of his teaching and example" ; he kept burning 
" the beacon of an ideal life above our lower region 

says Spenser {Works, iv., 305) ; later still he convinces himself "of 
what I had long taken for granted, that his versification was 
mainly modelled on the Italian and especially on the Divina 
Commedia." {Letters, ii., $^6.) 

^ Works, iv., 308. 'Ibid., ii., 118. 3 Jbid,, i., 352, 



i68 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

of turmoiL" What has he told us definitely in 
Rousseau about sentimentalism? What has he 
told us at all about the influence of Richardson 
in France or in Europe, or about his connection 
with Rousseau? In Coleridge what has he said 
definitely about the infiuence of the greatest of 
English critics? His ''service was incalculable"; 
the subtle apprehension of his mind seems an 
instinct; he was *'the first in noting some of the 
more occult phenomena of thought and emotion." 
And Fielding? He discusses his comedies, but 
says of his influence only that he was an originator 
who invented the realistic novel. ^ What of the 
influence of these men, what pregnant ideas of 
theirs took root and modified the opinions or 
thoughts of others? One will meet, it must be 
confessed, no satisfactory answer to this question 
by a diligent search through Lowell's works. 

It has already been pointed out that Lowell's 
sympathy with certain phases of literature was 
imperfect. That imperfect sympathy was due 
not only to a certain narrowness in Lowell himself 
but to the inadequacy of his penetration. In his 
works and letters one finds few references to the 
novelists; his Fielding is not the work of a man 
who regarded the novel as a type of literary expres- 
sion which even before his own day had become 
of prime importance. His chief interest in fiction 

' Works t vi., 64. 



PENETRATION 169 

seems to have been as a relaxation.^ No hint 
appears that he realized how powerful a factor 
the novel had become in modern-day life ; how 
much of the place once occupied by Chaucer and 
Spenser, by Shakespeare and the Elizabethan 
dramatists, by Dry den and Pope and Restoration 
Comedy, has been gradually preempted by 
Richardson and Fielding and Scott and Jane 
Austen, and in Lowell's own day by Thackeray 
and Dickens and George Eliot. In the hands of 
these masters, the novel was a work of art as 
certainly as the narrative poem with Chaucer and 
the drama with Shakespeare. The Newcomes 
and David Copperfield and Middlemarch have a 
deeper significance than the passmg of a pleasant 
hour. They are the expression of their day, its 
doubts and fears, its faith, its opinions, its aspira- 
tions. Lowell demanded of poetry that it be the 
expression of its own time; but this other literary 
form, which had come to be the most powerful 
vehicle of human emotion, seems to have had to 
his mind no significance. In his eyes Fielding 
had been a great man, for all men have accepted 
him and he is a classic. But he is of interest to 
the critic not for what he stands for of himself, 
but because he can be referred to in connection 
with Chaucer and Shakespeare. 

To weakness of penetration no less than to 

"■ Letters, i., 390 ff. Cf. Letters, ii., 433: "I read novels . . . 
a new habit with me. " 



170 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

imperfect sympathy is also to be ascribed Lowell's 
sweeping condemnation of Victorian poets who 
have employed Greek and medieval themes. The 
pivotal point, he holds, of Greek motivation is 
Fate and thus an essential difference separates 
the Greeks from us.^ Thus the Greek point of 
view must be to our eyes piurely factitious ; Merope 
and Atalanta and the rest are ultimately not a 
reality but an imitation.^ Lowell, it is worth 
remembering, does not level his criticisms against 
other than Victorian poets who sought Greek or 
medieval themes. It may be that his conserva- 
tism would not warrant his pushing his belief to 
its logical conclusion and thus including in his 
condemnation a line of poets from Chaucer 
through Keats. The merit of his contention in 
the abstract need not detam us. But one feels 
that he has failed to see that the Greek spirit and 
the medieval spirit have not without reason at- 
tracted many minds in the nineteenth centiu-y; 
that it is this spirit, only when clothed in essential 
humanity, which is ultimately the life-giving 
element in the Greek and the medieval stories; 
that love and hatred and desire and the heart- 
break of shattered ideals are of all time and may 
be woven into a Grecian boar-himt or a tourna- 
ment below Camelot, as well as into the life of 
modern Boston or London. ^ Lowell seems to 

^ Works, ii., 124 ff. " Ihid., ii., 134. 

3 On this point cf. Swinburne, Essays and Studies, p. 97. 



PENETRATION 171 

have limited his objections to poetry. Against 
Scott's novels he makes no protest. Perhaps it 
is significant of the relatively imimportant place 
which the novel occupies in his mind in comparison 
with poetry, that he should object to the theme 
of the Idylls of the King but not to that of Ivanhoe, 

In more than one notable instance, one finds 
Lowell strangely oblivious to merits which are too 
eminent to pass without recognition. One reads: 
"The Saxon was never, to any great extent, a 
literary language."' Again: "The Anglo-Saxons 
never had any real literature of their own. They 
produced monkish chronicles in bad Latin, and 
legends of saints in worse metre. "^ Lowell would 
probably not assume so dogmatic an attitude to- 
day, since during the last forty years there have 
become more widespread an understanding of the 
Anglo-Saxon language and an appreciation of the 
Anglo-Saxon literature. Lowell was a student of 
the language, it is true, but always the conserva- 
tive, was not the man to blaze new paths, even in 
the domain of literature. With no less surprise 
one notes his failure in his Chaucer to mention 
Troilus and Criseyde, that study of feminine psy- 
chology tmsurpassed in English literature for 
subtlety and penetration. Here again, however, 
one is to remember that adequate appreciation 
of this poem was not usual a generation ago. The 
question comes to mind: Would not a genuine 

» Works, iii., 11. » Ibid., iii., 320. 



172 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

penetration have triumphed over such conserva- 
tism and proclaimed a merit even though but few 
eyes had already perceived it? 

One more phase of Lowell's lack of penetration 
remains to be noted. In discussing the Eliza- 
bethan dramatists, he says: ''To some of them we 
cannot deny genius, but creative genius we must 
deny to all of them, and dramatic genius as well." ' 
This seems a surprising statement when one re- 
calls The Silent Woman, New Way to Pay Old 
Debts, and The Maid's Tragedy, to name no more. 
But Lowell's attitude is not difficult to imderstand. 
The Elizabethan dramatists, he assures us, are 
*'the best comment ... to convince us of the 
immeasurable superiority of Shakespeare."^ It 
has already been pointed out that Lowell's atti- 
tude towards Shakespeare is one of admiration 
to which no laudation seems extravagant. He is 
the "miracle of Stratford," and in the process of 
his apotheosis, ''creative genius" and "dramatic 
genius" must be held as the sacred possession of 
him alone. What again becomes of Lowell's 
penetration? Before the radiant figure of his 
literary god, it seems to vanish into thin air. 

* Old English Dramatists, p. 24. ^ Ihid., p. 26. 



CHAPTER VI 
Lowell's type of mind 

LOWELL, it has been already suggested, was 
a conservative. '*I was always a natural 
tory," he wrote, ''and in England . . . should be 
a staunch one. I would not give up a thing that 
had roots to it, though it might suck up its food 
from graveyards."' In religion, also, whatever 
doubts may have assailed him, he was a conser- 
vative. ^ ''I look upon a behef as none the worse 
but rather the better for being hereditary, prizing 
as I do whatever helps to give continuity to the 
being and doing of man, and an acciimulated 
force to his character."^ In the sphere of litera- 
ture it was the same. He approaches a considera- 
tion of the classics of language with a realization 
that they are great by tmiversal consent and with 
a determination to find in them what others have 
discovered. ''What," he asks, "is a classic, if it 
be not a book that forever delights, inspires, and 
surprises, — ^in which and in ourselves, by its help, 
we make new discoveries every day?""* Works 

^ Letters, ii., 136. » Ihid., ii., 325. ^ Ihid., ii., 152. 

4 Latest Literary Essays, p. 143. 
173 



174 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

which have lasted generations he cannot approach 
except from the traditional viewpoint of accept- 
ance. His whole attitude may be seen in his 
experience with Hamlet: 

Many years ago ... I pleased myself with imagining 
the play of Hamlet published under some alias^ as 
the work of a new candidate in literatiure. Then I 
played . . . that it came in regular course before 
some well-meaning doer of criticisms, who had never 
read the original, . . . and endeavored to conceive the 
kind of way in which he would be likely to take it. I 
put myself in his place, and tried to write such a 
perfunctory notice as I thought would be likely, in 
filling his column, to satisfy his conscience. But it 
was a tour de force ... I could not arrive at that 
artistic absorption in my own conception which 
would enable me to be natural . . . My result was a 
dead failure ... I could not shake ofiE that strange 
accumulation which we call self, and report honestly 
what I saw and felt even to myself, much less to 
others.^ 

This is the epitome of Lowell's conservatism as it 
concerns the classics of Hterature. 

Not so fundamental as Lowell's conservatism, 
though none the less an element in him with which 
one must reckon, was his enthusiasm, which has 
been spoken of in another place. His enthusiasm, 
positive and negative, if it may be so distinguished, 
is scarcely ever in abeyance. One can feel it 

^ Works, iii., 28 ff. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 175 

gathering in intensity as it proceeds. Starting 
with the declaration, "My respect for what Lea- 
sing was, and for what he did, is profoiind," 
Lowell's expression of respect moves onward 
through ''Greater poets she (Germany) has had, 
but no greater writer," till by the end of a page 
it becomes such high admiration as this : 

The figure of Goethe is grand, it is rightfully pre- 
eminent, it has something of the calm, and some- 
thing of the coldness, of the immortals; but the 
Valhalla of German letters can show one form, in its 
simple manhood, statelier even than his.^ 

The critic's enthusiasms in the case of many 
authors were abiding but so exclusive in their 
nature as to lead him into extravagances of state- 
ment which he was afterwards forced to contradict. ^ 
His negative enthusiasms, especially when con- 
cerned with a writer for whom his conservatism 
does not demand deep acknowledgment, is no 
less conspicuous. Beginning with the declaration, 
" Skelton was an exceptional blossom of autumn," 
he continues : 

A long and dreary winter follows. Surrey ... is 
to some extent another exception . . . but he has no 
mastery of verse, nor any elegance of diction. We 

1 Works y ii., 171 ff. 

2 E. g., cf. Works, iii., 92, with ibid., ii., 244; Works, iii., 36, 
with Latest Literary Essays, p. 114, etc. 



176 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

have Gascoigne, Surrey, Wyatt, stiff, pedantic, 
artificial, systematic as a country cemetery, and, 
worst of all, the whole time desperately in love . . . 
They are said to have refined our language. Let us 
devoutly hope they did, for it would be pleasant to be 
grateful to them for something, ^ 

and so on. 

Lowell was to a considerable extent a creature 
of moods; their influence at times betrays itself 
in his essays. The eighteenth century is not a 
favorite with him but in Gray"^ he writes: ''As one 
grows older, one finds more points of half -reluc- 
tant sympathy with that undyspeptic and rather 
worldly period." He goes on praising its 

cheerfulness and contentment with things as they 
were ... If there was discontent, it was in the 
individual, and not in the air . . . Post and tele- 
graph were not so importunate as now . . . Man- 
ners occupied more time and were allowed more 
space. 

Finally after nearly three pages of laudation, he 
confesses: "This, no doubt, is the view of a special 
mood, but it is a mood that grows upon us the 
longer we have stood upon our lees." This "view 
of a special mood" was beyond question not in- 

^ Works, iv., 274. It was Poe who wrote of Lowell, "He must 
be a fanatic in whatever circumstances you place him." Poe's 
Works, vi., 240. ' Latest Literary Essays. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 177 

frequent with Lowell. It never, one may believe, 
interferes with his final pronouncements on a 
classic author to whom he devotes an essay, but 
it sometimes affects the tone with which he dis- 
cusses single qualities. Is he weary of what he 
regards as the morbid egotism of his own day? 
Then he must laud Shakespeare's serene restraint 
which kept him from talking of himself, ^ or Dry- 
den's quahty of ''blowing the mind clear."'' Is 
he tired from over-reading? Then Wordsworth 
"wrote too much to write always well," though 
his product is by no means notably large. These 
moods he allows to affect him even more in the 
case of less important writers. Fagged out with 
long reading, his mood is obvious in his attack on 
Gower : 

Love, beauty, passion, nature, art, life, the natural 
and theological virtues, — there is nothing beyond 
his power to disenchant, nothing out of which the 
tremendous hydraulic press of his allegory . . . 
will not squeeze all feeling and freshness and leave 
it a juiceless pulp.^ 

Angry at British editors, he brands HalHwell's 
Marston as ''the worst edition we ever saw of any 
author." 4 This imtil he comes to another editor 

* Works, iii., 94. 

^ Ibid., iii., 189. "To look at all sides, and to distrust the 
verdict of a single mood, is, no doubt, the duty of a critic." 
Works, iii., 114. 3 Ihid., iii., 330. 4 Ihid., i., 272. 

12 



178 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

in the same series, and then, "Of all Mr. Smith's 
editors, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt is the worst."' 
;{ The secret of Lowell, however, does not end with 
mood or enthusiasm ; going even deeper, it does not 
end with conservatism. In a letter of December 
15, 1849, Fredrika Bremer wrote of Lowell and 
his wife : 

Her mind has more philosophical depth than his. 
. . . He seemed to me occasionally to be brilliant, 
witty, gay, especially in the evening, when he has 
what he calls his "evening fever," when his talk 
is like an incessant play of fireworks.^ 

Lack of philosophical depth. The weakness which 
Miss Bremer discovered is worthy of an examina- 
tion. If it proves to be true it will make many 
things clear. 

It has already been pointed out that Lowell 
failed to get to the heart of things and of men. 
The subject is worth further scrutiny. Complex 
characters eluded him. One feels a certain satis- 
faction in his study of such men as Lessing with 
his "simple manhood, "^ and of Landor, fragmen- 
tary though it is, for in them were no subtleties to 

' Works, i., 304. 

^ Homes of the New World, i., 134. Lowell wrote of Miss 
Bremer: "She is one of the most beautiful persons I have ever 
known — so clear, so simple, so right-minded and -hearted, and 
so full of judgment." Letters i., 174. The last four words are 
worth noting. 3 Works, ii., 172. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 179 

baffle him. But Thoreau he cannot understand; 
he is too complex. The critic accuses him of 
sentimentalism, but still the Concord recluse 
defies his analysis. Rousseau, ''many ways a 
complex character," lies beyond him, and Carlyle 
equally, of whom he writes in 1884: *'I find . . . 
him more problematic than ever. "^ He wrote 
on Lessing but passed by Goethe, whose figure 
"is grand, is rightfully preeminent," but who 
''to make a study . . . would soil the maiden 
petals of a woman's soul. "^ He has "the best 
possible Swift in his head," but his review of 
Forster's Swift in the Nation is evidence that the 
great Dean, "generous miser; skeptical believer; 
devout scoffer; tender-hearted misanthrope, "^ lay 
quite beyond the reach of the critic's psychological 
insight. Sometimes he gives up in frank despair 
as in the case of Rousseau. ^ Again, as in treat- 
ing of Dante, he would simplify the character by 
denying certain phases which tended to make it 
complex. The lover of Beatrice never gave him- 
self up to the gratification of sense ; the portrayer of 
Francesca and her lover could not be vindictive. 
Even in treating men less difficult, it has been 
pointed out that he never gets to the radical 
explanation of their qualities. ^ He always leaves 
a substratum tintouched, whose presence he may 

^ Letters, ii., 282. » Works, ii., 172; 194. 

3 Nation, vol. xxii; April 13, April 20, 1876. 

4 Works, ii., 262. s Vide ante, Chap. V. 



i8o LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

at times have guessed, but to which he could not 
penetrate. One begins to understand why Lowell 
did not attempt the method of Sainte-Beuve. 

Lowell's essays, studied as wholes, betray a 
weakness which shows itself in many ways.^ 
He once attempted a novel but abandoned it. His 
comment is significant: "As for the novel, in the 
first place I can't write one nor conceive how any 
one else can." Consecuity of thought was not a 
strong point with Lowell. Paragraphs frequently 
follow one another without any inter-relation save 
that of dealing with the same author. This is 
sometimes true of sentences in the same paragraph. 
The following is typical of such inconsecuity. 
Speaking of the quarrel between Pope and Addison 
and the former's explanation of the cause, Lowell 
says: 

Let any one ask himself how he likes an author's 
emendations of any poem to which his ear had 
adapted itself in its former shape, and he will hardly 
think it needful to charge Addison with any mean 
motive for his conservatism in this matter. 

The next sentence runs: "One or two of Pope's 
letters are so good as to make us regret that he 
did not oftener don the dressing-gown and slippers 

^ One is reminded of Lowell's own words in another connection: 
"The essays confuse by the multiplicity of details while they 
weary by want of continuity." Works, iv., 79. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND i8i 

in his correspondence. One in particular, to Lord 
Burlington, describing a journey,"' etc. He 
constantly returns in his studies to matters he has 
already considered. In his non-literary essays, he 
rambles along, finally coming not to a conclusion 
but to a stop. His literary essays have much 
of this desultory character. The butterflies of 
chance allusion proved irresistibly alluring and he 
never overcame his weakness for giving chase to 
them. Opening a volume at random, one finds: 
"So far as all the classicism then attainable was 
concerned, Shakespeare got it as cheap as Goethe 
did, who always bought it ready-made." Then 
follows two-thirds of a page on Goethe's method 
of obtaining ''ready-made classicism."* Again, 
after discussing Chaucer's alleged irregularities of 
metre, he says : "Enough and more than enough on 
a question about which it is . . . hard to be pa- 
tient." But he cannot be content and pursues 
the topic for nearly three pages further.^ 

It is beyond doubt that some of the blemishes 
of Lowell's essays are due to re- working of old ma- 
terial, but not so the weaknesses in his logic. Dis- 
cussing the question whether Rousseau were a 
self -deluded poseur, he asks: "Have we any right 
to judge this man after our blunt English fash- 
ion . . . ? Is French reality precisely our reality? 

» Works, iv., 53. " Ihid., iii., 46. 

3 Ihid., iii., 348. Of Lowell's mind one recalls Lamb's words 

in another connection: "Its motion is circular, not progressive." 



1 82 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Could we tolerate tragedy in rhymed alexandrines, 
instead of blank verse?"' The want of parity 
between tolerating a pose which affects even the 
sphere of moral action and tolerating a type of 
verse, is obvious. He comes to the defense of 
Rousseau by attacking those who had borne testi- 
mony against him. Even though Burke were a 
'*snob,"^ Johnson an intimate of Savage, and 
Moore "the ci -devant friend of the Prince Regent, " 
Rousseau, one would think, remained no better 
nor worse for that. In discussing the Anglo- 
Saxon, Lowell sets out to examine his qualities, 
but shifts to a depiction of the modem English- 
man. ^ Doctor Johnson and John Bunyan, after 
centuries of Norman admixture, are not Cynewulf 
and ^Ifric. Speaking of the Elizabethan drama- 
tists, he says : ''How little they were truly dramatic 
seems proved by the fact that none, or next to 
none, of their plays have held the stage. "^ it 
was not unfortunate that ''seems" provided the 
critic with a loophole of escape from the strict 
implication of his statement. When he sums up 
Pope, the question at issue is this : Was Pope a poet? 
Suddenly in Lowell's resimie the question has 
become, not was Pope a poet, but was he a great 

^ Works, ii., 268. 

'Ibid., ii., 236. Cf. Letters, u., 421: "The only feeling ... in 
my memory concerning . , . [De Quincey] is that he was a kind 
of inspired cad." 3 Works, iii., 316. 

4 Old English Dramatists^ p. 24. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 183 

poet ? The implication in the question as thus put 
assumes the very point at issue. ^ 

The inexactness of Lowell's thought appears at 
times in his tendency to employ a word in some 
unexplained signification of his own or in his 
limitation of it to his own definition. He tells 
us that Shakespeare's method "was thoroughly 
Greek, "=" although Greek in what sense he fails to 
say. When he declares: **A rooted discontent 
seems always to underlie all great poetry, if it be 
not even the motive of it, " he leaves us to guess at 
his definition of ''discontent" or to go back to his 
sotirce for its meaning.^ When he calls Burke 
a sentimentalist, he defines the term to mean ''a 
man who took what would now be called an aes- 
thetic view of morals and politics. ' ' ^ Montaigne he 
regards as "really the first great modern writer, "^ 
"modem writer" meaning "the first who assimi- 
lated his Greek and Latin, and showed that an 
author might be original and charming, even classi- 
cal, if he did not try too hard. " ^ Such usage of a 
term in a special and sometimes tmdefined signi- 
fication is no less confusing because one reads in 
Lowell's letters: "It fags me to deal with particu- 

^ Said Lowell of Dryden : He "sees . . . that a man who under- 
takes to write should first have a meaning perfectly defined to 
himself and then should be able to set it forth clearly in the best 
words." 2 Works, iii., 92. 

3 Vide Hazlitt's Works, v., 3. 4 Works, ii., 233. 

^ Ibid., ii., 221. Cf. "Dante is . . . the founder of modem 
literature," ibid., iv., 229. 



184 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

lars." Such a declaration is a confession, not a 
defense. Speaking of Wordsworth, Lowell asks: 

How much of his poetry is likely to be a permanent 
possession? The answer to this question is involved 
in the answer to a question of wider bearing, — What 
are the conditions of permanence? Immediate or 
contemporaneous recognition is certainly not domi- 
nant among them . . . Nor can mere originality 
assure the interest of posterity . . . Since Virgil 
there have been at most but four cosmopolitan 
authors. . . . These have stood the supreme test 
of being translated into all tongues, because the 
large humanity of their theme, and of their handling 
of it, needed translation into none.' 



The matter in Lowell's hands, instead of being 
simplified, becomes steadily more complex. We 
ask again: How much of Wordsworth's poetry is 
likely to be a permanent possession? What are 
we to understand by "permanent"? Does the 
critic mean cosmopoHtan permanence or national 
permanence? On the meaning of the latter term 
depends the answer to the original question. 
Lowell seems for a moment to consider the bearing 
of recognition and originahty upon it, suddenly 
shifts the point from national to cosmopoHtan per- 
manence, and then leaves the question he has 
raised hanging in the air with an inadequate answer 
» Works, vi., 107 fif. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 185 

to one phase of it, and that not the phase which 
bears on the case.' 

Akin to the weakness which has just been dis- 
cussed, is the critic's lack of precision. His 
tendency to grope for the exact expression of an 
idea means not a paucity in vocabulary but a 
vagueness in thought. That incisive quality of 
mind which seizes upon the inevitable word, is 
evident only in flashes. Face to face with an idea 
which requires precision of thought and consequent 
precision of phrase, he handles it in the large, 
expanding or shifting it till its nicety is destroyed. ^ 
This lack of precision has to some extent already 
been exemplified; it betrays itself in Lowell's 
tendency to limit a word to a peculiar meaning of 
his own; in his avoidance of a definition even 
though such omission leaves his sentences foggy 
or meaningless; in his shifting of the point of dis- 
cussion; in his weakness of logic and inconsecuity 
of thought. 3 As to his habit of enlargement of 



^ This opening up of a question and leaving it hanging in the 
air is common with Lowell; e. g., Latest Literary Essays, p. 150, 
on the personal equation. This paragraph is an excellent example 
of Lowell's inconsecuity of thought. 

" For an excellent example of Lowell's weakness in close reason- 
ing and in precision of thought and expression, vide Works, iv., 
261, "No doubt it is primarily," etc. 

3 "Without clearness and terseness," says Lowell, "there 
can be no good writing whether in prose or verse." Works, iv., 
55. Again: " Precision of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought." 
Ibid., iv., 55. 



i86 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

phrase and shifting of the exact idea, the following 
is typical: 

Bonstetten tells us that "every sensation in Gray was 
passionate," but I very much doubt whether he 
was capable of that sustained passion of the mind 
which is fed by a prevailing imagination acting on 
the consciousness of great powers. ^ 

One cannot fail to perceive the hiatus between 
Bonstetten's idea and the idea as one finds it in 
Lowell's phrasing. Speaking of Fielding he says : 
''Hisimagination was of that secondary order . . . 
subdued to what it worked in; and his creative 
power is not less in degree than that of more purely 
ideal artists, but was different in kind, or, if not, is 
made to seem so by the more vulgar substance in 
which it wrought." The attempt at shading the 
thought becomes irksome and overnice for the 
critic to handle ; he engulfs it in this ample phras- 
ing: ''Certainly Fielding's genius was incapable of 
that ecstasy of conception through which the poetic 
imagination seems fused into a molten unity with its 
material,'' and so on.^ Aut Ccesar aut nihil! 
This phase of Lowell's lack of precision is evident 
when he sets one writer over against others for the 
comparison of style. Writing of Milton's blank 

^ Latest Literary Essays, p. i6. The italics are mine. 

' Works, vi., 55. For an excellent example of this largeness 
of phrase carried into a discussion, which in turn keeps beside the 
point, vide Old English Dramatists, p. 79 Q. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 187 

verse, with its ''variety of pause" and "majestic 
harmony, " he says: 

Landor, who, like Milton, seems to have thought 
in Latin, has caught somewhat more than others 
of the dignity of his gait, but without his length of 
stride. Wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps 
approached it, but with how long an interval ! Bryant 
has not seldom attained to its serene equanimity, 
but never emulates its pomp. Keats has caught 
something of its large utterance, but altogether fails 
of its nervous severity of phrase. ^ 

In the hands of a man of precision of mind, this 
method of cross-comparison may have certain 
advantages ; in the hands of Lowell it has few or 
none. For to set men into juxtaposition who offer 
only imperfect grounds for comparison is to run 
the risk of giving a false impression of both unless 
the treatment is of the nicest. To this same lack 
of precision of mind must be traced his betrayal 
into superlatives, although the immediate causes 
of that betrayal were his over-enthusiasm and 
perhaps a well-grounded suspicion that the prin- 
ciples adduced to support his conclusions were 
inadequate. 

Further light on Lowell's type of mind is not 
wanting. His conceptions of matters at all 
abstract were vague, and his application of what 

I Works, iv., 86. Cf. ibid., ii., 114; iii., 129 ff. Latest Literary 
Essays, p. 4. 



1 88 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

he regarded as fundamental ideas broke down in 
the face of varying conditions. He defines form 
as ''the artistic sense of decorum controlling the 
coordination of parts and ensuring their harmoni- 
ous subservience to a common end."^ Style is 
something different, ''a lower form of the same 
faculty or quality whichever it be"; it "has to 
do with the perfection of the parts themselves. " ^^ 
He is uncertain whether style is a faculty or a 
quality; but imagination '4s the faculty that 
shapes, gives unity of design and balanced gravi- 
tation of parts. "3 Rhythm "shapes both matter 
and manner to harmonious proportion. " ^ " Reach 
of mind . . . selects, arranges, combines, rejects, 
denies itself the cheap triumph of immediate 
effects, because it is absorbed by the controlling 
charm of proportion and unity. "^ Taste is "a 
true sense of proportion. " ^^ Style again "con- 
sists mainly in the absence of undue emphasis and 
exaggeration. " 7 Again it is "that exquisite some- 
thing . . . which . . . makes itself felt by the 
skill with which it effaces itself, and masters us at 
last with a sense of indefinable completeness."^ 
Again it is "the establishment of a perfect mutual 
understanding between the worker and his ma- 

^ Precision, says Lowell, comes of insight. Old English 
Dramatists, page 56. 

* Latest Literary Essays, p. 144. 

3 Works, iii., 30. 4 Ibid., ii., 117. s Ibid., iii., 332. 

« Ibid., iii., 317. ? Ibid., iii., 353. » Ibid., iii., 31. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 189 

terial. "^ Such a confusing medley of meanings 
suggests Lowell's inability to get at the ultimate 
and his consequent weakness for improvising 
definitions to fit any particular case which might 
arise. 

In Shakespeare, Lowell attempts to work out 
the Tempest as an allegory : Prospero is the Imagi- 
nation, Ariel is the Fancy, Caliban is ''the brute 
Understanding, " who, ''the moment his poor wits 
are warmed with the glorious liquor of Stephano, 
plots rebellion against his natural lord, the higher 
Reason." Miranda is "abstract Womanhood"; 
"Ferdinand is Youth." His allegory gets no fur- 
ther. One may suspect that the difficulty of 
accounting for Womanhood as the daughter of 
Imagination, of identifying the higher Reason 
with the Imagination, and the like, may have 
baffled him. His inconsistencies and contradic- 
tions, indeed, are constantly occurring; the reason 
is the same. His notions about Nature and the 
interactions of sympathy between her and man are 
vague and contradictory. He points out as a 
weakness in others an attitude of mind which he 
confesses to in himself.^ He adopts Carlyle's 
famous definition of history^ only to deny its 
soundness. '^ And so one might go on. 

It has already been pointed out that a fimda- 

'^ Works, iii., 37 ff. 

2 Cf. Works, ii., 266; i., 376; Letters, ii., 66, 424; ibid., i., 366. 

3 Ibid., vi., 91 ; ii., 284. 4 Ibid., ii., 99. 



190 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

mental idea of Lowell's was that of moral character 
as a necessity for a great poet; that this idea 
expanded till he declared character to be "the 
only soil in which real mental power can root 
itself and find sustenance."^ But difficulties 
beset him. What of Goethe and Burns and Byron 
and Rousseau, to name no others? He answers: 
"Shakespeare, Goethe, Bums, — what have their 
biographies to do with us? Genius is not a ques- 
tion of character. "^ The man and the genius are 
different beings.^ "We forgive everything to the 
genius; we are inexorable to the man. "^ For 
"There is nothing so true, so sincere, so down- 
right and forthright, as genius. It is always truer 
than the man himself is, greater than he. " "* What 
becomes of character as the only soil in which 
real mental power can root itself and find suste- 
nance? What becomes of the critic's declaration 
that "for good or evil, the character and its 
intellectual product are inextricably interfused? "^ 
Rousseau the man, he insists, is not to be consid- 
ered in connection with Rousseau the genius.^ 
But soon the critic changes his mind; we are 
justified in examining Rousseau's character, for he 

^ Works, ii., 195. 'Ibid., ii., 241. 

3 "The poet and the man are two different natures; though 
they exist together, they may be unconscious of each other, 
and be incapable of deciding on each other's powers and efforts 
by any reflex act. " Letter of Shelley to Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne, 
July 19, 1 82 1. 4 Lowell's Works, ii., 244. 

s Ibid., iii., 271. <• Ibid., ii., 240 ff. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 191 

is a professed moralist. ' Then we shall not forgive 
everything to the genius? No, answers the critic, 
for in natures incapable of escaping from them- 
selves, ''the author is inevitably mixed with his 
work, and we have a feeling that the amount of his 
sterling character is the security for the notes he 
issues."^ Then genius may be a question of 
character? Yes, answers the critic, except in the 
single case of the ''highest creative genius . . . 
for there the thing produced is altogether dis- 
engaged from the producer."^ Who is to be 
numbered among the highest creative geniuses? 
We are not told. Let it be asstimed that Shake- 
speare is one of that high company; let it be as- 
sumed either that character is the only soil in which 
real mental power can root itself and find suste- 
nance, or that character is quite apart from genius. 
What of Shakespeare then? The critic rates the 
poet's genius so high as to make it a confirmation 
of a creative Deity, ^ but rates his character 
"higher even than . . . [his] genius. ""* Perhaps 
after all the critic was right when he suggested 
that character was a nobler form of genius. ^ But 
one remembers that genius is "always truer than 
the man himself is, greater than he. " ^ How does 
the critic support this last assertion? By demand- 
ing to know whether Shakespeare's contemporaries 
would have "left us so wholly without record of 

^ Works, ii., 241 and 243. ' Ibid., ii., 257. 3 Ibid., iii., 93. 
4 Ibid., iii., 94. s Ibid., ii., 171. ' Ibid., ii., 244. 



192 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

him as they have done, " if he as a man "had been 
as marvellous a creature as the genius that wrote 
his plays? "^ Nine months later Lowell has 
changed his mind and reversed the answer to his 
own question.^ What was before a reason for 
depreciating Shakespeare's character becomes a 
reason for exalting it. Shakespeare, says Lowell, 
was wonderfully exceptional because of "his 
utterly unimpeachable judgment, and that poise 
of character which enabled him to be at once the 
greatest of poets and so unnoticeable a good citizen 
as to leave no incidents for biography. "^ But 
why go on? In small as in great things it is the 
same: vagueness of thought, largeness of expres- 
sion, failure to meet a difficulty fairly, weakness for 
avoiding or shifting or missing the point at issue, 
inability to answer difficulties without raising new 
contradictions, the contradictions left \mrecon- 
ciled because unreconcilable except to a philo- 
sophic mind. To say that Lowell never took the 
trouble to bring his contradictory statements into 
harmony is to assume the real point, which is : Was 
it possible for Lowell to bring his contradictions — 
when they went at all deep — ^into harmony? The 

^ Works, ii., 244. 

" In Shakespeare, in North American Review, April, 1868. 

3 Works, iii., 92. For a typical example of Lowell's vagueness 
of thought and expression, vide Works, iv., 261, "No doubt it is 
primarily, " etc. Cf. Letters, i., 357: "You see what I mean — or, 
at any rate, that I have a meaning, which is the main thing. " 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 193 

unity which lies at the root of variety was precisely 
what presented difficulties to Lowell. It was 
pointed out earlier that his enthusiasm led him to 
express views on character and genius which 
tended to exalt that author who was the subject 
of his immediate study. Lowell's enthusiasm 
would never have been allowed so to dominate 
him, had he possessed philosophic depth of mind. 

One begins to understand why the law, with its 
demands of penetration to basic principles, of 
•exactness in conception and expression, of con- 
secuity of thought and of logical reasoning, should 
not have appealed to Lowell. Small wonder that 
he wrote: It is a calling ''which I hate and for 
which I am not well fitted to say the least. " ^ 

Such comments as this upon himseh are frequent 
in LoweU. It would be to demand of him that 
quality of mind which he did not possess were one 
to expect him to suggest the ultimate source of his 
own weaknesses. Many of these weaknesses he 
saw in other writers.'' What he says of himself 
has a particular interest ; it points the way to a con- 
firmation of our contention. Here is the man of 
feeling, whose early conceptions of a work to be 

^ Letters, i., 66. 

* For example, he says of Milton : " He was far more rhetorician 
than thinker." {Works, 'w., 84.) Of Richter: "Delightful as 
Jean Paul's humor is, how much more so would it be if he only 
knew when to stop." Lowell did not take kindly to criticism 
from others. Cf. Letters, i., 121 ; ihid., ii., 65 ff.; Howells, 
Literary Friends and Acquaintance, p. 224. 
13 



194 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

written are vague and Itiniinous in the warm haze 
of first imaginings: "The germ of a poem ... is 
always delightful to me, but I have no pleasure in 
working it up. " ^ Here is the man of feeling again : 
" One of my great defects . . . is an impatience of 
mind which makes me contemptuously indifferent 
about arguing matters that have once become 
convictions."^ One gets new light on this impa- 
tience of mind if one recalls another admission of 
Lowell's, "It fags me to deal with particulars. " ^ 
There is the man of feeling again, whose ideas are 
in the large, because the result of impression, and 
never crystallized by contact with the touchstone 
of ultimate principles. It is worth while to lis- 
ten to these self -revelations ; they help to establish 
our contention. Lowell says in one of his letters : 
" I must see the full face [of truth] and then the two 
sides have such different expressions that I begin 
to doubt which is the sincere and cannot surrender 
myself. "^ In the Cathedral, he speaks of those 

"Who see two sides, with our posed selves debate." 

How often the "two sides" belonged to one and 
the same truth, if only he had been able to per- 
ceive it! That " uniformity in variety," which, as 
Professor Beers says, "it is for . . . the philoso- 
pher to detect,"^ lay beyond Lowell's powers to 

' Letters, ii., lo. * Ibid., i., 134. 

» Ibid., ii., 280. * Points at Issue, p. 1 15. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 195 

perceive. He never seems to have realized the 
significance of this weakness. 

He wrote in 1875 : " I am one of the last ... of 
the great readers," and he confesses to being 
''rather an unwilling writer. " ' With all his wide 
reading, how much real thinking did Lowell do? 
Did he have his eyes turned inward upon himself 
when he wrote: ''It is curious . . . how tyranni- 
cal the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make 
to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread 
being left alone with so much as our own minds." ^ 
Did he find his own mind a bore with which he 
dreaded to be left alone? He writes in a letter of 
December, 1884: "Every now and then my good 
spirits carry me away and people find me amusing, 
but reaction always sets in the moment I am 
left to myself."^ We are not without illumi- 
nating commentaries on this. Fifteen months 
later, writing of Gray,^ he says: "He was cheerful 
... in any company but his own, and this, it 
may be guessed, because faculties were called into 
play which he had not the innate force to rouse 
into more profitable activity. " To what was due 
this lack of innate force? Lowell answers, indo- 
lence, "intellectual indolence." One need not 
stop to consider whether or not Lowell's diag- 
nosis of Gray is sound. One's interest in it is 

^ Letters, ii., 154. ' Works, i., 21. ^Letters, ii., 289. 

4 New Princeton Review for March, 1886, now in Latest Liter- 
ary Essays. 



196 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

keen, not for what it tries to tell us about Gray, 
but for what it actually does tell us about Lowell. 
Beyond doubt the critic thought he read in the poet 
symptoms which he found in himself. He dis- 
covers that Gray like himself is cheerful only in 
company; he decides that Gray's "constant en- 
deavor was to occupy himself in whatever would 
save him from the reflection of how he might 
occupy himself better." Was it for a similar 
reason that Lowell read omnivorously, but wrote 
unwilHngly?^ Was he eager to escape what would 
demand thought? ''I always write my longest 
letters," he says, "when I have something else to 
do. It seems so like being industrious.'" ^ Ho wells 
tells us: "Lowell liked to have some one help 
him idle the time away and keep him as long as 
possible from his work." The critic offers in 
explanation of Gray the weakness which he thinks 
explains himself. He writes: "I have never been 
able to shake off the indolence (I do not know 
whether to call it intellectual or physical) that I 
inherited from my father."^ One does not find 
that physical indolence is the term to apply to this 
man Lowell who enjoys the experiences of the 
Moosehead Journal, who likes frequent and long 
tramps in the open, who goes on vacation trips to 

^ Cf. Letters, ii., 154. 

' Ibid., ii., 346. The italics are mine. Cf. Latest Literary 
Essays, p. 20: Lowell was thinking of himself when he wrote: 
"Nobody knew better than Johnson what a master of casuistry- 
is indolence." 3 Letters, ii., 280. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 197 

the Adirondacks and finds delight in the free Hfe 
of the woods. Lowell gives us the key to the 
answer in his own case when he expresses the 
belief that Gray's indolence was intellectual. He 
finds that Gray was melancholy in his own com- 
pany just as he was himself. ^ And why ? * * Gray's 
melancholy was that of Richard II. : — 

**I wasted time, and now doth time waste me, 
For now hath time made me his numbering clock." 

Here again Lowell thinks he finds in Gray the 
same symptoms as in his own case and suggests a 
similar explanation, — something akin to remorse. 
"I have thrown away hours enough to make a 
handsome reputation out of," Lowell wrote in 
1876. Again he speaks of the time when "I am 
in Mount Auburn, with so much undone that 
I might have done."^ And still again: "I feel 
that my life has been mainly wasted — that I have 
thrown away more than most men ever had," 
but he was never able, he says, to shake off indo- 
lence. Thus one gets back to indolence again ; but 
one is not in the throes of a vicious circle ; the ex- 
planation is not far to seek. Lowell was a man of 
feeling, not a man of thought ; he read enormously 
and found in reading a threefold satisfaction: his 
impressionism was sated; thought was cheated 
into a semblance of real activity by following the 
course of another's mind ; it seemed, to use his own 

^ Letters, ii., 289. 2 Ibid., ii., 215. 



198 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

words in another connection, "so much like being 
industrious." Conceptions of poems and essays 
fell short in the reality.' He came to reaHze 
that something was lacking in his work. And 
with the passing years was bom a dissatisfaction, 
not alone, one may believe, with the amount of his 
writings, for the amount was not small. He 
"has lived so long and done so little. " ^ His feel- 
ing of dissatisfaction with his life and of something 
akin to remorse for his supposed sins of omission 
sprang not from a moment's mood of depression, 
but from the consciousness of a fatal defect in him- 
self which robbed his accomplishment of its best 
vitality. It was characteristic of Lowell that in 
tracing this defect he got no further than his 
indolence, one may say his intellectual indolence. 
An outgrowth of that infirmity was doubtless the 
dependence on stimuli outside of himself which 
was so marked in Lowell's case and which has 

^ "The conception of the verses [The Flying Dutchman] is 
good; the verses are bad ... As for putting back what was 
in the first copy — the said first copy went up my chimney Sunday 
afternoon, as airy and sparkling a poem as I meant it to be when 
it came first into my head. If I could recover it with the fervor of 
the flame and the grace of the smoke still in it ! That's the kind 
of thing we dream of — the copy you have is the kind of thing we 
do. " Letters, i., 397 ff. Cf. ibid., i., 345 ff ; ii., 10. '"I have the 
best possible Swift in my head if I could only get him out.' . . . 
Apparently he had planned a paper on Swift of the proportions of 
one of his North American articles; what actually appeared was a 
brief review of Forster's Life of Swift in the Nation." Scudder, ii., 
198. Cf. Letters, ii., 166 fi. ' Letters, ii., 367. 



LOWELL'S TYPE OF MIND 199 

already been discussed. But to say that the secret 
of the critic's shortcomings is found in intellectual 
indolence, is to shut one's eyes to the real signifi- 
cance of the weaknesses which have already been 
pointed out; it is, in a word, to stop short of the 
fundamental explanation. ** All thought is sad, " ^ 
said Lowell, and in so far as he spoke for himself 
he was right. It is sad when it is something we 
make shift to escape from ; it is sad when it brings 
us no nearer a radical truth than its seemingly 
contradictory facets; it is sad finally to that man 
with whom penetration is an occasional moment's 
flash of insight and not a quaHty of mind. Be- 
hind Lowell's intellectual indolence lay his real 
weakness: lack of philosophic depth of mind. 
To that lack is to be attributed the absence of 
genuine vitality in his critical essays. Remember- 
ing this, we find that Lowell's feelings of a wasted 
life are explicable. It is fair to believe that he 
suspected, perhaps even realized, that he had 
failed to penetrate to the heart of his subject; 
that his work in consequence, when judged by 
what he had hoped to achieve and by the criticism 
of admitted masters, was tried and found wanting. 
What he did not realize, perhaps not even suspect, 
was that the deficiency of his essays had root in a 
deficiency of his type of mind. An examination 
of Lowell's critical method will not contradict 
this contention. 

' Poetical Works, iv., 61. 



CHAPTER VII 

LOWELL: THE CRITIC AND HIS CRITICISM 

LOWELL'S early critical works have already 
been discussed. They are worth bearing 
in mind as eminently characteristic of the mature 
Lowell. They are discursive, generally vague 
when the question at issue becomes abstruse, and 
abound in purple patches. The qualities of the 
poets discussed are set down without any endeavor 
to mark their inter-relation or to trace them back 
to any radical characteristic. Poems are regarded 
from the standpoint of their effect on the reader, 
and that effect is translated into figurative lan- 
guage. In his Lectures on the English Poets, Lowell 
followed the same method. He translated his 
impressions into simile and metaphor. He never 
got at the ultimate answer to a difficult question. 
In his first lecture he said: "The lecturer on 
science has only to show how much he knows — the 
lecturer on poetry can only be sure how much he 
feels." Here is the secret of Lowell's critical 
method. However uncertain he might be about 
penetrating to ultimate principles, he was sure of 

200 



THE CRITIC AND HIS CRITICISM 201 

the feelings which a poem aroused in him. His 
method in consequence was essentially sjibjective, 
because, after all, only a matter of impression. 
When he pointed out the various qualities of an 
author, he was still making use of his impressions, 
as in that clever jeu d' esprit, A Fable for Critics. 
Such a work as the Fable was peculiarly suitable 
to a man of Lowell's type of mind. For in it he 
was not restrained by that conservatism which 
was botmd to accept a classic with deference, nor 
by those particulars with which it fagged him to 
deal, nor by the necessity of appealing to the 
principles of judgment in literature. He could 
give a brilliant exhibition of critical pyrotechnics, 
and he did. But critical pyrotechnics is not 
criticism. Lowell came to realize this and in his 
Lectures on the English Poets, he tried to be better 
than his creed. For he did not altogether content 
himself with his impressions about poets and their 
poetry. His attempts at penetrating to ultimate 
principles were hardly successful or satisfying,' 
but they showed a tendency in the right direction. 
Lowell was coming to realize that criticism, to 
possess vitality, must go deeper than the mere 
impressions of the critic. 

By the time he came to maturity in his critical 
essays, he could write : 

Unless we admit certain principles as fixed beyond 
^ E.g.y chap, i., called Definitions. 



202 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

question, we shall be able to render no adequate 
judgment, but only to record our impressions, which 
may be valuable or not, according to the greater or 
less ductility of the senses on which they are made. ^ 

This need not lead one astray; Lowell remained 
an impressionist. He reads a work through, 
making marginal notes as he goes along, realizes 
a total impression and then sets to work. In his 
typical essays he presents this total impression, 
then the tale of his author's separate qualities, 
then his total impression again as a summary. 
This procedure explains in some degree the fre- 
quent inconsequence of his summary, which 
rarely is warranted in any strict sense by the array 
of qualities adduced. He is not blind to this 
himself. He reads Dry den, gets his total impres- 
sion, which as usual seems broader than the aggre- 
gation of qualities would warrant, and confesses: 
^^ Yon feel that the whole of him was better than 
any random specimens, though of his best, seem 
to prove."'' He tries hard to give warrant to his 
general impression, but finally contents himself 
with an emphatic reaffirmation of it. ''It is 
hard," he says in Gray^ "to justify a general 
impression by conclusive examples. Two in- 
stances will serve to point my meaning, if not 
wholly to justify my generalization. " ^ His atti- 

^ Works, iii., 29, written in 1868. 

' Ibid., iii., 103. The italics are mine. 

3 Latest Literary Essays ^ p. 4. 



THE CRITIC AND HIS CRITICISM 203 

tude as an impressionist is evident in occa- 
sional statements of his own : He has "read through 
his (Thoreau's) six volumes in the order of their 
production." He continues: ''I shall try to give 
an adequate report of their impression upon me 
both as critic and as mere reader.'"'- In his sum- 
mary of Spenser he quotes three of the poet's 
striking lines, prefacing his selection by the state- 
ment that they ''best characterize the feeling his 
poetry gives us."'' 

Not being content merely with appreciation, 
Lowell, as has been suggested, made various 
endeavors to go deeper ; it was when he attempted 
"to give a reason for the faith that was in him" 
that his failure was most marked. His inability 
to handle at all adequately difficult or abstract 
questions has already been referred to. They 
bear out the point that Lowell was a man of feeling 
rather than of thought. For they retreat from 
the definite and specific and concrete into the 
large and figurative and vague. Speaking of 
Shakespeare, to cite here but one new example, 
Lowell says: His "moral is the moral of worldly 
wisdom only heightened to the level of his wide- 
viewing mind, and made typical by the dramatic 

^ Works, i., 369. The italics are mine. 

2 Ihid., iv., 352. The italics are mine. Cf. "In gathering up 
the impressions made upon us by Mr. Masson's work," etc. 
{Works, iv., 86); also "I find a confirmation of this feeling about 
Dryden," etc. {Works, iii., 123). 



204 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

energy of his plastic nature."^ One is tempted 
to say of this as De Quincey said of Pope: His 
''language does not realize the idea; it simply 
suggests or hints it." The following passage, 
though rather lengthy, is worth quoting. It is typi- 
cal and will repay analysis as indicative of several 
weaknesses in Lowell which have already been 
discussed. He has used the phrase ''imaginative 
unity," and now says: 

The true ideal is not opposed to the real, nor is it 
any artificial heightening thereof, but lies in it, and 
blessed are the eyes that find it! It is the mens 
divinior which hides within the actual, transfigur- 
ing matter-of-fact into matter-of -meaning for him 
who has the gift of second-sight. In this sense 
Hogarth is often more truly ideal than Raphael, 
Shakespeare often more truly so than the Greeks. I 
think it is a more or less conscious perception of this 
ideality, as it is a more or less well-grounded persua- 
sion of it as respects the Greeks, that assures to him 
as to them, and with equal justice, a permanent su- 
premacy over the minds of men. This gives to his 
characters their universality, to his thought its irradi- 
ating property, while the artistic purpose running 
through and combining the endless variety of scene 
and character will alone account for his power of 
dramatic effect.* 

How far does all this penetrate through the 

' Works, iii., 324. 

* Ibid., iii., 66. Cf. also ibid., ii., 79, 99; iv., 284; iii., 92, etc. 



THE CRITIC AND HIS CRITICISM 205 

mist of words into the realm of ideas? To use 
Matthew Arnold's words in another connection, 
they ''carry us really not a step farther than the 
proposition which they would interpret." It is 
not easy to bring oneself to examine such passages 
of LoweU from a coldly analytic point of view. 
He has such a generous flow of language that one 
is inclined to accept his words as surcharged with 
meaning. On submitting them to examination 
one seems to hear him say, "You see what I mean 
— or, at any rate, that I have a meaning, which is 
the main thing." De Quincey's words on Pope 
come to mind again, ''His language does not 
realize the idea." This is but another phase of 
that weakness which rims through all Lowell's 
critical essays and which "keeps him amid sym- 
boHsm and illusion and the fringes of things." 
We face here the same question which constantly 
confronts us: What was this weakness? And 
always one answer remains. 

In saying that Lowell was an impressionist, one 
need not deny that he had certain definite ideas 
about poetry. Three he adhered to : poetry must 
be interesting'; it must possess the power of 
imaginative appeaP; it must have finish of ex- 
pression or verbal style. ^ So far as Lowell 

^ Works, ii., 142. Cf. also ibid., ii., 134; Old English Dramatists, 
pp. 19 and 20. ' Cf. Ibid., iii., 31, 32, 35; iv., 267. 

3 Cf. Ibid., iii., 15, 46, 335; iv., 308; vi., 107; Old English 
Dramatists, p. 106. 



206 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

applied these criteria at all, it was with no cer- 
tainty of method. Merope is impossible because 
dull.^ Most of Wordsworth's poetry will perish 
because it lacks style.'' No poetry possesses true 
vitality which does not "leap throbbing at touch 
of that shaping faculty, the imagination."^ For 
the most part, however, Lowell relies upon the 
soundness of his impression to assure him that a 
work is excellent. That impression he then casts 
about to justify. That this is his procedure is 
evident in general from a study of his essays and 
in particular from his tendency to shift his em- 
phasis from one poetical quality to another. In 
his essay on Spenser, the "epicure of language," 
he emphasizes diction to the point where he con- 
fesses that he lays himself open to the charge of 
over-stressing this single attribute. "^ In his essay 
on Shakespeare whose "imagination is wonderful" 
he declares that the "power of expression is sub- 
sidiary, and goes only a little way toward the 
making of a great poet. "^ Calderon, he declares, 
is "one of the most marvellous of poets, "^ indeed 
"a greater poet than Goethe, "^ but yet he cannot 

' Works, ii., 134. ' Ibid,, iii., 35. 3 Ibid., iv., 267. 

4 Ibid., iv., 308. Cf. also iii., 335; vi., 107; Old English Drama- 
tists, p. 106. s Works, iii., 31. 

^ Letters, ii., 149. "I find a striking similarity between Faust, 
and this drama (Magico Prodigioso), and if I were to acknowledge 
Coleridge's distinction, should say Goethe was the greatest phi- 
losopher and Calderon the greatest poet." Letter of Shelley to 
John Gisborne, April 10, 1822. 7 Works, vi., 108. 



THE CRITIC AND HIS CRITICISM 207 

decide whether the Spaniard's gift were imagi- 
nation or fancy. But what did it matter? He 
considered Calderdn a marvellous poet for all that. 
His taste told him so ; the ultimate reason why did 
not matter. Whether a poet was great because 
his work was rich in style or imagination or interest 
was of only secondary importance to Lowell. The 
primary consideration with him was his impres- 
sion; to this he clung, however inadequate or 
contradictory his reasons in its support. 

Before saying the final word, it is worth while 
to take a glance at Lowell the critic from the view- 
points we have occupied in studying him. He had 
a wide knowledge, gained from school and college 
and legal studies, from the demands put upon 
him in sanctum and classroom, from foreign 
travel, intimate acquaintance with modern lan- 
guages, enormous reading, and friendship with 
men of culture and learning. He was proficient 
in linguistics and held to illuminating principles 
regarding the vitality of language. In his knowl- 
edge of art and history, and in his sympathy for 
science and classic art, he was deficient. While 
towards literature his sympathy was broad enough 
to include almost all the greater classics of various 
languages, he was deficient in sympathy for the 
nineteenth century and regarded the fifteenth 
throughout Europe as almost a literary desert. 
His condemnation was evoked by sentiment alism, 
by the employment in poetry of Greek and medie- 



2o8 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

val themes, by modem-day realism. His interest 
in the drama and the novel was of the slightest. 
Lowell seems honestly to have tried to preserve a 
judicial attitude towards the subjects of his 
critical essays. Towards the greater classics, 
especially Dante and Shakespeare, his attitude 
became one of frank encomium. He was subject 
to enthusiasms which often swept him into over- 
statements of both praise and blame. When 
his devotion to an author did not blind him to his 
defects, he struck a fair balance of justice, not so 
much by maintaining a coolly impartial attitude 
as by swinging pendulum-wise between praise and 
blame. Lowell could never keep the personal 
equation in subjection. So far as taste belongs 
to penetration by being that faculty which does 
not stamp as excellent a piece of literature which 
is poor, Lowell may be said to have possessed 
penetration. But his taste in recognizing an 
excellent piece of Hterature was not so sound. 
Considerations which should not have weighed 
with him made him at times ignore or deny the 
merit of certain works. In so far as penetration is 
insight into the mind of an author or his art and 
into the ultimate principles which stamp him as 
sui generis and explain him, Lowell was wanting. 
His taste was intuitive. He had to trust it to 
justify him without the aid of radical principles. 
Porro unum est necessarium. The final gift whose 
presence, even despite his deficiencies, would 



THE CRITIC AND HIS CRITICISM 209 

have made him a genuine critic of merit, stamps 
him by its absence as merely an impressionist. 
What principles he had, became more or less 
distorted when he endeavored to apply them; in- 
deed they always had the air of being extemporized 
for the particular case under discussion. That 
penetration which goes deep in a moment's flash, 
Lowell displays on occasions. But the sudden 
rending of the veil seems as unexpected to him 
as to the reader. The knowledge which thus 
suddenly opens to his gaze is not used to illumi- 
nate the whole man or his work ; the critic seems 
uncertain how to employ it and the benefit of 
that swift inner glimpse is lost. It is not unjust to 
say of Lowell that penetration with him was an 
occasional gift of such insight as comes at times to 
most men of imaginative temperament ; it was not 
a quality of mind. 

The ultimate secret of Lowell's weakness did 
not he, it is reasonable to maintain, in his own 
power to remedy. It belonged to his type of 
mind. That precision in detail which a classical 
training might be supposed to foster and whose 
importance would be emphasized by the demands 
upon him as editor and professor, is for the most 
part wanting. That disregard of the unessential, 
that closeness of reasoning, that penetration to 
ultimate principles, all of which a course of legal 
training would inculcate in a mind receptive to 
such influence, left no perceptible traces on Lowell. 



2IO LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

His course in law seems to have fulfilled no purpose 
except that of eqmpping him with legal phrases 
for figurative use. Porro unum est necessarium. 
Lowell lacked philosophical depth of mind, the 
one thing so necessary that without it the total 
of his other endowments was inadequate. 

One difficulty remains: if this contention is 
true, how are we to account for Lowell's high place 
as a critic? Without going into a history of 
American criticism, it is fair to say that, with 
the exception of Lowell, only three critics among 
his predecessors or contemporaries demand con- 
sideration, Poe, Reed, and Whipple. Reed's 
life ended while he was still a young man. Though 
his work indeed shows poise and though tfulness, he 
betrays a tendency to value literature for its 
moral rather than for its aesthetic value. He lacks 
the buoyancy which went so far to make Lowell 
readable. Whipple is inclined to be heavy-footed; 
there is no sparkle in his pages. He has a cer- 
tainty of tone, born doubtless of his success on the 
platform, which is not justified by the precarious- 
ness of his judgments. Poe deserves a study by 
himself. He had many of the essential gifts of an 
excellent critic, but was unfortunate enough to 
become involved in literary bickerings, and to 
"give up to party what was meant for mankind. " 
Much of his work was ephemera critica; it perished 
with the writings which evoked it. Lowell 
entered the field, and with the prestige which 



THE CRITIC AND HIS CRITICISM 211 

belonged to him as a poet and as the academic 
successor of Ticknor and Longfellow, wrote of the 
masters of Hterature. Something of the buoyancy 
and verve of the man clung to his work. Here 
were a wealth of allusion, a heightened rhetoric, 
a pregnant homeliness of illustration, and yet 
withal something of the air of the Edinburgh and 
the Quarterly domesticated in America. These 
critiques seemed to join the literary traditions of 
polished old England on the one hand to the eager 
yearning for culture of crude New England on the 
other. Here was a critic, it was thought, and a 
poet and professor as well, who might match lances 
with the critics over-seas. New England itself, Bos- 
ton, was the centre of Hterary America in Lowell's 
time, and the leaders in its literary ascendancy 
were his friends. Who was there to undertake 
the ungracious business of pointing out weak- 
nesses in his critical work?' Men who came in 
direct contact with him seem to have found him 
brilliant and charming in his mood. It is not 
hard to believe that the sparkling cleverness of 
Lowell and the range of allusion made possible by 
his enormous reading and retentive memory, 
astonished as well as dehghted the men with whom 
he came closely in contact ; that their admiration 
led them not only to attribute to him a depth of 
mind which he did not possess, but also perhaps to 

^ Severely critical articles appeared in Scrihner's Monthly , iv., 
75» 227, 339, and in Lippincott's for June, 1871. 



212 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

believe they found evidences of it in his critical 
essays. To doubt it indeed might well seem 
heresy. Men of a younger generation, no less 
than of his own, came to know Lowell on familiar 
terms and to their writings regarding him rather 
than to those of his immediate contemporaries, is 
due the maintenance of the Lowell tradition. 

It has been said already that it is not easy to 
probe into the weaknesses of a critic who has 
achieved so many quotable phrases. Remember- 
ing them one is almost disarmed. But this quota- 
bility, what of it? To read the more recent 
works in which reference is made to Lowell, makes 
one fact striking: Lowell's dicta are introduced, 
not because they are surcharged with a pregnancy 
which makes them an open sesame to an author's 
mind or art ; not because they contain a luminous 
definition which makes the elusive more nearly 
tangible, or crystallizes what lurks too often in 
the realm of feeling ; not, in a word, for any intrinsic 
merit they possess as criticism in a high degree, 
but mainly for their quotability. ' Quotability 
does not prove Lowell a great critic any more than 
it proves Pope a great poet. If it were taken 
as a test, Lowell might sit next to Coleridge, and 
Pope to Shakespeare. 

^ "Mere vividness of expression, such as makes quotable 
passages, comes of the complete surrender of self to the impres- 
sion, whether spiritual or sensual, of the moment. " Lowell's 
Works ^ iii., 31. 



THE CRITIC AND HIS CRITICISM 213 

Can Lowell grapple with principles like Cole- 
ridge? Or interpret with steady lucidity and 
consistence like Hazlitt? Or give one that pecul- 
iar flash of insight by which Lamb illumined an 
author not for a moment but abidingly? Can 
he penetrate a problem in the psychology of liter- 
ature, like De Quincey in Knocking at the Gate in 
Macbeth, or achieve a pregnant distinction, like 
that between the literature of knowledge and the 
literature of power? Can he apply a wide-reach- 
ing principle of human significance like Carlyle, 
who by fitting the Johnson-Boswell relation to 
hero-worship, revolutionized forever the world's 
opinion of Bos well? Has he given us criteria 
broad enough for general application, like Arnold 
in his description of the grand style and his defi- 
nition of poetry? Has he a command of principles 
like Hutton, whose ethical and aesthetic notions 
were not constantly at the grapple? Has he, in a 
word, given us principles of wide appHcation, 
which may be applied consistently and which 
stimulate the reader to expand and to modify 
them, thus eventually arriving at permanent 
criteria for himself? 

It may be objected that such comparisons and 
such demands are unfair to Lowell ; that one ought 
to accept him for what he is. It is the piirpose 
of this study to endeavor to appraise him for what 
he is and candidly to inquire whether he belongs 
to the ranks of critics. No conclusions which aim 



214 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

to state the real truth about Lowell are unfair. 
He has been regarded as a critic ; in such a light he 
seems seriously to have regarded himself. But to 
assign him such a rank is to do him the injustice 
of over-estimation. If he would claim kinship 
with Ulysses, let him prove his metal by bending 
the hero's bow. 

If Lowell is to survive, it must be frankly as an 
impressionist. For so far as criticism approaches 
a science, so far as it depends to any serious extent 
on ultimate principles, so far, in a word, as it is 
something more fundamental and abiding than 
the ipse dixit of an appreciator, Lowell is not a 
critic. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Arnold, M. Celtic Literature and On Translating Homer, New 

York, 1883. 

Discourses in America, New York, 1894. 

Essays in Criticism (First and Second Series), New York, 

1891. 
Beers, H. A. History of Eighteenth Century Romanticism, 

New York, 1899. 

History of Nineteenth Century Romanticism, New York, 1901. 

Points at Issue, New York, 1904. 

Bremer, Fredrika.. Homes of the New World, 3 vols. (tr. Mary 

Howitt), London, 1853. 
Brooke, S. A. English Literature, New York and London, 1899. 
Brownell, W. C. American Prose Masters, New York, 1909. 
Bruneti^re, F. Essays in French Literature (tr. D. N. Smith), 

London, 1898. 
Burton, R. Literary Leaders of America, Boston, 1904. 
Carlyle, T. Works. Cent. Mem. Ed., Boston, 1899. 
Cheney, J. V. That Dome in Air, Chicago, 1895. 
Coleridge, S. T. Works, New York, 1871. 
Cooke, G. W. Bibliography of James Russell Lowell, Boston and 

New York, 1906. 

-Poets of Transcendentalism, Boston and New York, 1903. 

Cross, W. L. Development of the English Novel, New York, 1899. 

Curtis, G. W. James Russell Lowell, New York, 1893. 

De Quincey, T. The Eighteenth Century, New York, 1878. 

Literary Criticism, New York, 1878. 

Dowden, E. Studies in Literature, London, 1878. 
Emerson, R. W. Works, Boston and New York, 1903. 
Federn, K. Dante and His Times, New York, 1902. 

215 



2i6 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Frothingham, O. B. Transcendentalism in New England, New 

York, 1876. 
Greenslet, F. James Russell Lowell, Boston and New York, 

1905. 
Hale, E, E. James Russell Lowell and His Friends, Boston and 

New York, 1899. 
Hale, E. E., Jr. James Russell Lowell, Boston, 1899. 
Hazlitt, W. Works, London and New York, 1902-04. 
Ho WELLS, W. D. Literary Friends and Acquaintance, New 

York, 1900. 
HuTTON, H. H. Essays in Literary Criticism, Philadelphia, 

1876. 
James, H. Essays in London, New York, 1893. 
Lamb, C. Critical Essays, London and New York, 1903. 
Specimens of Dramatic Poets, 2 vols. , London and New 

York, 1903. 
Lawton, W. C. The New England Poets, New York, 1 898. 
Longfellow, H. W. Hyperion, Boston and New York, 1899. 
Lowell, J. R. American Ideas for English Readers. 

Class Poem, Cambridge, 1838. 

Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, Cambridge, 1845. 

Early Writings, London and New York, 1902. 

Impressions of Spain (Compiled by J. B. Gilder), Boston 

and New York, 1899. 

Last Poems, Boston and New York, 1895. 

Latest Literary Essays, Boston and New York, 1892. 

Lectures on the English Poets, Cleveland, 1897. 

Letters, 2 vols., New York, 1894. 

Memoir of Shelley, prefixed to Poetical Works of Shelley, 

Boston, 1857. 

Old English Dramatists, Boston and New York, 1892. 

Poetical Works, 4 vols., Boston and New York, 1890. 

Prose Works, 6 vols., Boston and New York, 1896. 

The Round Table, Boston, 1913. 

Lowell, Maria. Poems, Cambridge, 1855. 

Macaulay, T. B. Essays, Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous, 

6 vols., New York, 1864. 
March, G. P. Lectures on the English Language, 4th ed., New 

York and London, 1863. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 217 

Meynell, Alice. Rhythm of Life, London, 1893. 

NiCHOL, J. American Literature, Edinburgh, 1898. 

OssiLi, M. F. Art, Literature, and the Drama, Boston, 1874. 

Pater, W. Appreciations, New York and London, 1895. 

Payne, W. M. The Book of American Literary Criticism, New 

York and London, 1904. 
PoE, E. A. Works, London, 1884. 
Reed, H. Lectures on British Poets, London, 1863. 
Richardson, C. F. American Literature, 2 vols., New York and 

London, 1887. 
Robertson, J. M. New Essays toward a Critical Method, 

London, 1897. 
Sainte-Beuve, C. a. Causeries du Lundi, Paris, 1850. 
Saintsbury, G. History of Criticism, 3 vols., Edinburgh and 

London, 1900-04. 
ScuDDER, H. E. James Russell Lowell, Boston and New York, 

1901. 
Shelley, P. B. Defense of Poetry (Ed. A. S. Cook), Boston, 

1903. 
Spingarn, J. E. Literary Criticism of the Renaissance, New 

York and London, 1899. 
Stedman, E. C. Poets of America, Boston and New York, 

1885. 
Stuart, G. Essays from Reviews, Quebec, 1892. 
Swinburne, A. C. Essays and Studies, London, 1875. 
Taylor, B. Critical Essays, New York, 1880. 
Thoreau, H. Walden, 2 vols., Boston and New York, 

1897. 
Trent, W. T. American Literature, New York, 1903. 
Underwood, F. H. James Russell Lowell, Boston, 1882. 

James Russell Lowell, Poet and Man, Boston, 1893. 

Watson, W. Excursions in Criticism, London and New York, 

1893. 
Wendell, B. Literary History of America, New York, 1900. 

Stelligeri, New York, 1893. 

Whipple, E. P. Outlooks on Society, Literature, and Politics, 

Boston, 1898. 
Wilkinson, W. C. A Free Lance, New York, 1874. 
Woodberry, G. E. Makers of Literature, New York, 1900. 



21 8 LOWELL AS A CRITIC 

Wordsworth, W. Literary Criticism, London, 1905. 

Academy, 7: 271. 

40: 155. 

Andover Review, 16: 294. 
Athenceum, '91, 2: 257. 
Atlantic Monthly, 90: 862. 
Blackwood's, 150: 454. 
California University Chronicle, 8: 352. 
Catholic World, 23: 14. 
Chautauqua, 16: 554. 
Contemporary Review, 60: 477. 
Critic, 16: 91. 

19: 82, 92, 291. 

Current Literature, 42: 410. 

Dial, 45: 157. 

Eclectic Magazine, 2>'2\ ^10. 

Edinburgh Review, 174: 377* 

Fortnightly Review, 44: 79. 

Forum, 12: 141. 

Gentlemen's Magazine, 249: 464, 544. 

Harper's, 86: 846. 

International Review, 4: 264. 

Lippincotfs, 7: 641. 

50:534 

56:717 

62: 252. 

Literary World, 16:217, 225. 

22: 290. 

Living Age, 195: 416. 
Nation, 10: 258. 

12: 128. 

Nineteenth Century, 17: 988. 

North American Review, 153: 460. 

North British Review, 46: 472. 

Publication of Modern Language Ass'n of America, Vol. VII 

Review of Reviews, 4: 291. 

Saturday Review, 72: 53» 180. 

73:255- 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 219 

Scribner^s, 15: 186. 
Spectator, 58: 744. 

66:693. 

67:215. 

Unitarian Review, 36: 436. 

Note: An extensive bibliography of articles by Lowell, only 
some of which have been republished (in the Round Table, 
Boston, 1 9 13), is given in the appendix to Scudder's biography 
of Lowell. 



INDEX 



A 



Abra, Prior's, 67 

A h sal om and A chitophel, 

Dryden's, 55, 145 
Addison, Joseph, 56, 180 
^Ifric, 182 
^schylus, 44, 45, 96 
Agamemnon, Browning's, 91 
Agassiz, Louis, 39 
Among My Books, Lowell's 25 
Angelo, Michael, 50, 74 
Anne, Queen, 71 
Annus Mtrabilis, Dry den's, 

153 

Anthologia Graeca, 42 

Anti-Slavery Standard, 15 

Antony and Cleopatra, 127 

Ariel (in Tempest), 189 

Ariosto, 79 

Aristophanes, 44, 45 

Aristotle, 43, 82 

Arnold, Matthew, 93, no, 148, 
149, 155. 156, 157, 160, 161, 
162, 205, 213 

Arnolfo, 83 

"Assumption," (of Titian), 74 

Astrcea Redux, Dryden's, 153 

Atalanta in Calydon, Swin- 
burne's, 92, 170 

Atlantic Monthly, 23, 24, 30, 
37 

Aurora Leigh, Browning's, 100 

Austen, Jane, 169 

B 

Ballads, 19 
Ballads, Percy's, 56 



Balzac, Honore, 53, 99 
"Band, The," 5, 17 
Barbour, John, 54 
Barnfield, Richard, 67 
Beatrice (in Divina Commedia), 

113, 154, 179 
Beauclerc, Topham, 117 
Beaumont and Fletcher, 64, 

95 

Beers, H. A., 194 

Bells and Pomegranates, 
Browning's, 90 

Bernard, Charles de, 53, 99 

Bemers, Baron (translator of 
Froissart), 165 

Biglow Papers, Lowell's, 15, 16, 
24, 37, 64 . ^ , 

Biographia Literana, Cole- 
ridge's, 87 

Birds, Aristophanes', 96 

Blackstone's Commentaries, 4 

Blaine, James G., 27 

Boccaccio, Giovanni, 50, 77 

79, 113 

Boileau, Nicolas, 42, 58 
Bonstetten, Charles Victor de, 

160, 186 
Books and Libraries, Lowell's, 

97 
Boston Courier, 15 
Boston Miscellany, 8, 11, 12, 

13,30, 31, III, 140 
Boswell, James, 33, 213 
Bothie, Clough's, 89 
Bremer, Frederika, 178 
Briggs, Charles F., 14, 17, 

158 
Bright, John, 29 
Broadway Journal, 14 



221 



222 



INDEX 



Browning, E. B., loo 
Browning, Robert, 90, 91, 93 
Brunelleschi, Filippo, 83 
Bryant, William Cullen, 16 
Bunyan, John, 60, 182 
Burke, Edmund, 103, 117, 

121, 182, 183 
Burlington, Lord, 181 
Burns, Robert, 112, 190 
Butler, Samuel, 19 
Byron, Lord, 35, 52, 87, 88, 

112, 190 



Calderon de la Barca, 51, 78, 
100, 141, 206, 207 

Caliban (in Tempest), 189 

Cambridge Thirty Years Ago, 
Lowell's, 3 

Cambridge University, 26, 27, 
68, 96 

Canovas del Castillo, 158 

Canzoni, Dante's, 82 

Carlyle, Thomas, 4, 53, 61, 62, 
71, 80, 103, 123, 125, 127, 
133, 141, 142, 143, 155. I59» 
167, 179, 189, 213 

Cathedral, Lowell's, 73, 194 

Catullus, 46 

Cavalcanti, Guido, 155 

Cenci, Shelley's, 104 

Century Magazine, 93 

Cervantes, 29, 51, 78 

Chamberlain, Joseph, 29 

Chansons de Geste, 132 

Chapman, George, 8, 11, 138 

Charles II., 69, 153 

Chastelard, Swinburne's, 92 

Chateaubriand, Viscount, loi 

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 11, 19, 20, 
45, 49, 52, 54, 55, 56, 57, 
66, 68, 78, 81, 83, 85, 112, 
113, 127, 130, 132, 137, 
140, 141, 142, 146, 151, 
152, 162, 163, 164, 165, 
166, 169, 170, 181 



Chaucer, Lowell's, 69, 130, 

132, 171 
Cicero, 63 
Cid, The, 27, 98 
Cimabue, Giovanni, 83 
Cinna, Corneille's, 49 
Claude Lorrain, 74 
Clough, A. H., 89, 93 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 29, 

59, 60, 61, 87, 107, 163, 212, 

213 
Coleridge, Lowell's, 168 
Collier, Jeremy, 114 
Collins, William, 13 
Confessio Amantis, Gower's, 

105 
Confessions of Rousseau, 120 
Congreve, William, 95 
Conversations on Some of the 

Old Poets, Lowell's, 11, 12, 

13, 19, 30, 31, 88, III, 122, 

127, 140 
Convito, Dante's, 82, 154 
Cooper, James, F., 16, 97 
Corneille, Pierre, 49, 63, 79, 

153 

Cowley, Abraham, 60, 153 
Cowper, William, 13 
Criseyde (in T roil us and 

Criseyde), 141 
Cromwell, Oliver, 69, 153 
Curtis, George William, 39 
Cvnewulf, 182 



D 



Dane Law School, 4 

Daniel, Samuel, 54 

Dante, 23, 35, 47, 49, 50, 52, 
71, 74, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82, 
83, 85, 92, 96, 113, 129, 
130, 141, 146, 151, 153, 
154, 155, 179, 208 

Dante, Lowell's, 78, 130, 131, 

153 
David Copperfield, Dickens', 

97, 98, 169 
Decameron, Boccaccio s, 50 



INDEX 



223 



Dekker, Thomas, 66 
Democracy, Lowell on, 39 
De Monarchia, Dante's, 82 
Denis, John, 123 
De Qiiincey, Thomas, 60, 204, 

205, 213 
De Vulgari Eloquio, Dante's, 

82, 154 
Dickens, Charles, 97, 98, 169 
Digby, Lady Venetia, 75 
Digby, Sir Kenelm, 75 
Dilke, Charles, 29 
Divina Commedia, Dante's, 

82, 129, 137, 154 
Dodsley, Robert, 56 
Donne, John, 66 
Don Quixote, Cervantes', 23, 

27, 29, 50, 98 
Don Sebastian, Dryden's, 63 
Dorothea (in James IV.), 

142 
Double Marriage, Beaumont 

and Fletcher's, 64 
Douglas, Gawain, 54 
Drake, Sir Francis, 68 
Dramatists of the Restoration, 

Alacaulay's, 69 
Drayton, Michael, 54 
Dryden, John, 49, 52, 55, 56, 

58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 69, 80, 

81,84,85,97, 114, 133, 140, 

144, 145, 150, 151, 153, 

169, 177, 202 
Dryden, Lowell's, 57, 69, 95, 

132, 144, 150, 153 
Dunbar, Battle of, 69 
Dunbar, WiUiam, 54 
Dunciad, Pope's, 86, 100 
Dunlop, Frances, 22, 36 
Diirer, Albert, 74 
Duty, Wordsworth's, 141 
Dwight, Timothy, 13 



E 



Early Writings, Lowell's, 12 
"Edelmann Storg, " 3 



Eliot, George, 98, 169 
Elizabethans, 66, 88, 90, 95, 

127 
EHzabethan Dramatists, 8, 9, 

12, 30, 140, 169, 172, 182 
Elizabethan England, 68 
Elizabethan Stage, 57 
Elizabeth, Queen, 68 
Emerson, R. W., 3, 4, 6, 16, 

23, 38, 39, 93, 125, 167 
Endymion, Keats', 103, 157 
Essay on Criticism, Pope's, 

86 
Essay on Man, Pope's, 86 
EucHd, 146 

Euripides, 45, 47, 96, 100 
Excursion, Wordsworth's, 13 



Fable for Critics, A, Lowell's, 
10, 15, 16, 201 

Faery Queen, Spenser's, 3, 131 

Falkland, Viscount, 69 

Falstaff (in He^iry IV.), 67, 
98 

Ferdinand (in Tempest), 189 

Fielding, Henry, 29, 56, 96, 
99, 100, 168, 169, 186 

Fielding, Lowell's, 97, 116, 
168 

Fields, James, T., 22, 24 

Fletcher, John, 64, 95 

Ford, John, 8, 11, 31, 103 

Forster, John, 179, 

Francesca (i n Divina Com- 
media), 130, 179 

Francis, St. (of Assisi), 71 

Frederick the Great, 71, 75, 

124, 143 

Freeman, see under Penn- 
sylvania 

French Revolution, Carlyle's, 

Friar Bacon, Greene s, 141 
Frobisher, Sir Martin, 68 
Fuller, Margaret, 10, 15 



224 



INDEX 



Gascoigne, George, 54, 104, 

176 
Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 83 
Giotto, 83 
Globe Theatre, 68 
Goethe, J. W., 48, 52, 53. 79, 

112, lyg, 181, 190, 206 
Goldsmith, Oliver, 13, 56 
Gower, John, 54, 105, 177 
Gray, Thomas, 56, 90, 158, 

160, 161, 195, 196, 197 
Gray, Lowell's, 56, 134, 176, 

202 
Greene, Robert, 105, 141 
Greenslet, F., 4 



H 



Hakluyt, Richard {Voyages), 

42 
Halliwell, J. O., 68, 177 
Hamlet, 174 
Hamlet, 108, 128, 174 
Harvardiana, 3 
Harvard University, 3, 27, 37, 

42,50 
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 16 
Hayes, R. B., 27 
Hazlitt, W. C., 67, 68, no, 

178 
Hazlitt, William, 60, 213 
Heath, J. F., 7 
Heine, H., 48 
Henry Esmond, Thackeray's, 

97 
Herbert, George, 13 
Heywood, Thomas, 67 
Higginson, Thomas Went- 

worth, 3 
Hind and Panther, Dry den's, 

145 
Holmes, O. W., 15, 16, 23, 158 
Homer, 43, 45, 67, 77, 96 
Hopkins, John, 105 
Horace, 46, 78 
Houghton, Lord, 156 



Howells, W. D., 23, 98, 99 
Hughes, Thomas, 26 
Hugo, Victor, 53 
Hume, David, 42 
Hutton, R, H., 146, 147, 148, 
149, 213 



Ibsen, Henrik, 99 

Idylls of the King, Tennyson's, 

90, 104, 171 
Iliad, 45, 100, 132 
Impressions of Spain, Lowell's, 

158 
Innocent III., 71 
Intimations of Immortality, 

Wordsworth's, 141 
Iphigenie, Goethe's, 52 
Irving, Washington, 27 
Isabella, Keats', 104 
Ivanhoe, Scott's, 171 



James, Henry, 98 

James IV., Greene's, 105, 141 

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte's, 

98 
Jane Shore, Rowe's, 95 
John of Northampton, 113 
Johnson, Life of, Boswell's, 

33 
Johnson, Samuel, 62, 117, 121, 
182, 213 



K 



Keats, George, 156 

Keats, John, 52, 53, 59, 87, 

139, 141, 146, 155, 156, 157. 
170 

Keats, Lowell's, 57, 87, 157 

Kent's Commentaries, 5 

Kipling, Rudyard, 33 

Knocking at the Gate in Mac- 
beth, De Quincey's, 213 



INDEX 



225 



Lamb, Charles, 60, 213 
Landor, W. S., 53, 93, 94, 103, 

178 
Langland, William, 54 
Laodamia, Wordsworth's, 104, 

141 
Laura (Petrarch's), 109 
Lear, 20, 67 
Leaves from my Journal, 

Lowell's, 3 
Lectures on the English Poets, 

Lowell's, 21, 200, 201 
Legend of Brittany, Lowell's, 

103 
Lessing, G. E., 62, 79, 81, 175, 

178, 179 
Lessing, Lowell's, 161 
Library of Old Authors, 64, 66, 

109 
Limberham, Dryden's, 58, 114 
Literary Friends and Acquaint- 
ance, Howell's, 38 
London Daily News, 15 
Longfellow, H. W.,21, 23, 

78, 104,211 
Lowell, Blanche, 14 
Lowell Institute, 18, 30, in 
Lowell, Maria, 18 (see also 

White, Maria) 
Lowell, Mrs. Charles, 2, 33 
Lowell, Rebecca, 10 
Lowell, Rev, Charles, i, 2, 33 
Lucan, 46, 47 
Lucretius, 46, 78 
Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth's, 

59 

M 

Macaulay, Thomas B., 11, 67, 

69, 73,' loi 
Maid's Tragedy, Beaumont 

and Fletcher's, 1 72 
Malebolge (Inferno), 155 
Malherbe, Francois de, 28 
Mansfield Park, Austen's, 97 



Marie de France, 49 
Marlborough, Duke of, 71 
Marston, Halliwell's, 177 
Marston Moor, Battle of, 69 
Massinger, Philip, 8 
Masson, David, 55, 66, 68, 69, 

109 
Maud, Tennyson's, 90 
Maximilian, Emperor, 75 
Mercedes, Queen, 28 
Meredith, George, 98 
Merope, Arnold's, 93, 170, 206 
Metrical Romances, 19 
Middlemarch, Eliot's, 169 
Midsummer Night's Dream, 

Shakespeare's, 95, 127 
Milton, John, 13, 19, 42, 52, 

53, 55, 56, 59, 66, 69, 70, 71, 

77,84,85,108, 109,130, 131, 

132, 136, 141, 153, 186, 193 
Miranda (in Tempest), 189 
Mitchell, S. Weir, 33 
Modern Italian Literature, 

Howell's, 98 
Moliere, 44 

Montaigne, 63, 139, 183 
Montrose, Marquis of, 69 
Montgomery, Macaulay 's, loi 
Moore, Thomas, loi, 117, ii8, 

182 
Moosehead Journal, Lowell's, 

196 
Moral Essays, Pope's, 86 
Morris, William, 91 
Motley, John L. 27 
My Study Windows, Lowell's, 

25 



N 



Napoleon, 72, 146 

Nation, 179 

Newcomes, Thackeray's, 169 

Newman, J. H., 112 

New Testament (Tyndale's), 

165 
New Way to Pay Old Debts, 
Massinger's, 172 



226 



INDEX 



Nicholas, Sir Harris, 1 13 
Nooning, The, Lowell's, 17, 

37 
North American Review, 24, 

^25. 37, 48, 86, 98 
Norton, Charles E., 24, 46, 50, 

73, 78, 106 
Novum Organon, Bacon's, 108 



Odyssey, 45, 100 

Old English Dramatists, 

Lowell's, 30, 140 
Old Plays, Dodsley's, 56 
Old Wives' Tale, Peele's, 105 
Our Own, Lowell's, 40 
Ovid, 46, 47, 78, 96 
Oxford University, 26, 29, 68 



Pamela, Richardson's, 96 

Peele, George, 105 

Pennsylvania Freeman, 13, 14 

Percival, loi 

Percy, Bishop Thomas, 56 

Peter Bell, Wordsworth's, 61 

Petrarch, 35, 50, 77, 79, 96, 
102, 109 

Phelps, Edward J., 30 

Pierce, Franklin, 158 

Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan's, 
60 

Pioneer, The, 9, 13 

Pisani, 83 

Plain Dealer, Wycherly's, 95 

Plato, 43 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 16, 38, 210 

Pope, Alexander, 2, 12, 19, 
49, 52, 55, 56, 58, 77, 80, 
86,87,95, 100, 115, 121, 122, 
123, 127, 133, 169, 180, 
182, 204, 205, 212 

Pope, Lowell's, 58, 85, 121, 

133, 138 
Prefaces, Wordsworth's, 59 
"Presentation of the Virgin," 

Titian's, 74 



Pretender (James Francis 

Edward Stuart), 70, 71 
Pride and Prejudice, Austen's, 

97 

Primrose, Dr. (in Vicar of 

Wakefield), 2 
Princess, Tennyson's, 89 
Progress of the World, Lowell's, 

72 
Prospero (in Tempest), 61, 189 
Putnam's Magazine, 40, 158 
Putnam, Mr., 6 



Racine, 79 

Rape of the Lock, Pope's, 86, 
122, 127, 133 

Recent Italian Comedy, How- 
ell's, 98 

Reed, Henry, 210 

Relapse, Vanbrugh's, 58 

Renaissance, 43 

Restoration, 58, 70, 71, 95 

Restoration Comedy, 169 

Review of American Literature, 
Fuller's, 10, 15 

Richard II, Shakespeare's, 197 

Richardson, Samuel, 96, 168, 
169 

Richter, Jean Paul, 48 

Roman de la Rose, 49 

Romeo (in Romeo and Juliet) , 68 

Rossetti, D. G., 92 

Rousseau, J. J., 49, 62, 79, 81, 
88, loi, 103, 115, 117, 118, 
119, 120, 121, 123, 125, 142, 
159, 160, 168, 179, 181, 182, 
190 

Rousseau, Lowell's, 96, 119, 
133, 159, 168 



Saint Andrews, University of, 

29 
Sainte-Beuve, 49, 53, 134, 135. 

151, 152, 153, 155, 160, 

180 



INDEX 



227 



Samson Agonistes, Milton's, 

52 
Satires, Pope's, 86 
"Saturday Club," 23 
Savage, Richard, 117, 182 
Schiller, Johanti von, 48, 163 
School for Scandal, Sheridan's, 

95 

Scott, Sir Walter, 33, 42, 97, 
169, 171 

Scudder, Horace, 97 

Shakespeare, 12, 31, 43, 44, 45, 
51,52, 53,54, 55,56,57,58, 
60, 61, 66,67, 74,75,77, 78, 
79, 81, 84, 85, 96, 108, 114, 
118,126, 127, 128, 129, 140, 
141, 142, 153, 162, 163, 164, 
169,172, 177, 183, 190, 191, 
192, 203, 206, 208, 212 

Shakespeare, Lowell's, 61, 68, 
69,95, 131, 132, 151, 189 

Shelley, P. B., 88, 112 

Sheridan, R. B., 95 

She Stoops to Conquer, Gold- 
smith's, 95 

Shylock (in Merchant of Ven- 
ice), 68 

Sidney, Algernon, 70, 71 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 54 

Silent Woman, Jonson's, 172 

Sir Launfal, Lowell's, 103 

Skelton, John, 175 

Smollett, Tobias, 42 

Song of Roland, 132 

Sophocles, 45 

Sordello, Browning's, 90 

Southey, Robert, 42 

Spence family, i 

Spens, Sir Patrick, i 

Spenser, Edmund, 3, 19, 40, 
54, 55, 56, 60, 84, 85, III, 
130, 131, 133, 137. 140, 141, 
150, 163, 169, 203, 206 

Spenser, Lowell's, 150 

Spinoza, 82 

Stael, Mme. de, 13 

St. Cecelia's Day, Dryden's 
145 



Stephano (in Tempest), 180 
Sterne, Laurence, 56, 107 
Stemhold, Thomas, 105 
Stewart, Dugald, i 
Stillman, W. J., 19 
Story, W. W., 3 
Strabo, 112 

Stuart, James, see Pretender 
Surrey, Earl of, 54, 104 
Swift, Forster's, 179 
Swift, Jonathan, 100, 123, 179 
Swinburne, A. C., 53, 92, 100, 
103 



Tacitus, 46 

Tasso, 35, 79 

Tempest, Shakespeare's, 95, 
189 

Tennyson, Alfred, 89, 93, 104 

Terence, 42 

Thackeray, W. M., 97, 98, 169 

Theobald, Lewis, 123 

Theocritus, 43 

Thoreau, Henry, 3, 7, 16, 23, 
39, 53. 102, 125, 126, 139, 
142, 143, 179, 203 

Thoreau, Lowell's, 125 

Ticknor, George, 211 

Tilden, Samuel, zj 

Titian, 74, 75 

Tom Jones, Fielding's, 99 

"Tribute Money," Titian's, 74 

Troihis and Criseyde, Chaucer's 
141, 171 

Troubadours, 54 

Trouveres, 54 

Turner, William, 75 

Turner's Old Temeraire, Low- 
ell's, J2 

Tvler, John, 25 

Tyler, Wat, 152 

Tyndale, William 165, 166 

U 
Unwin, Mrs., 13 



228 



INDEX 



Valdes, A. P., 90 
Vanbrugh, Sir John, 58 
Van Dyke, Sir Anthony, 75 
Vanity Fair, Thackeray's, 97 
Vega, Lope de, 51 
Venice Preserved, Otwaj'-'s, 95 
Venus and Adonis, Shake- 
speare's, 166 
Victorian Poets, 89 
Vinci, Leonardo da, 146 
Virgil, 45, 46, 78 
Vision of Piers Ploughman, 

Langland's, 19 
Vita Nuova, Dante's, 82, 154 
Voltaire, 49, 52, 58, 128 

W 

Wace, 49 

Walden, Thoreau's, 102 
Wallenstein, Coleridge's trans- 
lation of, 107 
Waller, Edmund, 100 
Walton, Isaac, 13 



M^ay of the World, Congreve's, 

95 
Webster, Daniel, 4, 37 
Webster, John, 8 
Wellington, Duke of, 71 
Wells, William, 3 
Westminster Abbev, 29 
Whipple, E. P., 210 
White, Maria, s, ii, 36, 37 
WHiittier, John G., 16, 23 
Willis, Nathaniel, 10 
Wordsworth, William, 13, 19, 

29, 52, 53, 59, 6c, 61, 87, 

104, 131, 137, 141, 146, 147, 

148, 149, 151, 177, 184, 

206 
Wordsworth, Lowell's, 57, 87, 

III 
Workingmen's College, 108 
Wuthering Heights, Emily 

Bronte's, 98 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 54, 104 
Wycherly, William, 95 



Year's Life, A, Lowell's, 8, 10 



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